Am I using application dispatching in Flask correctly? - python-3.x

Question

I am fairly new to Flask applications, but well versed in Python. I have recently begun making web applications instead of regular application and I'm trying to gather some of them on a single server. Enter "Application Dispatching".
I was hoping to be able to develop an app locally and then deploy it on the server using dispatching. This means that locally I will have a script that launches the Flask app (wsgi.py), which imports stuff in the application. Now, once I add it to the dispatcher, I import the new application. This means that before the wsgi.py was a script and now it is a module - all hell breaks loose.
dispatcher.py:
from flask import Flask
from werkzeug.middleware.dispatcher import DispatcherMiddleware
from werkzeug.exceptions import NotFound
from app1 import app as app1
from app2 import app as app2
from app3 import app as app3
from app4 import app as app4
app = Flask(__name__)
app.wsgi_app = DispatcherMiddleware(NotFound(), {
"/app1": app1,
'/app2': app2,
'/app3': app3,
'/app4': app4,
})
if __name__ == "__main__":
app.run()
app1\__init__.py: (works like this, but merely a proof of concept / simple app)
from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)
#app.route("/")
def index_one():
return "Hi im 1"
if __name__ == "__main__":
app.run()
Both of these work - the dispatcher and the app1 can be run independently. Now, let's say I need to import a module to make app1 more functional:
from flask import Flask
import db
...
Since the dispatcher is in a parent directory, in order for it to work I need to do something like this:
from . import db
# or
from app1 import db
Now the application doesn't work independently anymore. I would like to avoid either having to refactor the application every time it needs to be deployed or adding a lot of boilerplate code like this:
if __name__ == "__main__":
import db
else:
from . import db
In any case this doesn't work when configuring the app with app.config.from_object("config.Config") as it can't be forced to be relative import (?) and otherwise can't find it without explicitly telling it which module it resides in.
From the tutorial, I got the sense that I could isolate the applications from each other:
Application dispatching is the process of combining multiple Flask
applications on the WSGI level. You can combine not only Flask
applications but any WSGI application. This would allow you to run a
Django and a Flask application in the same interpreter side by side if
you want. The usefulness of this depends on how the applications work
internally.
The fundamental difference from Large Applications as Packages is that
in this case you are running the same or different Flask applications
that are entirely isolated from each other. They run different
configurations and are dispatched on the WSGI level.
What am I doing wrong and can I get it working like I describe, by being able to launch the applications isolated or on the dispatcher, without changing my code or adding a bunch of unrelated boilerplate code to make it work?

Answer 1

I figured it out myself and indeed was using application dispatcher wrong. It will always integrate the different applications into one server instance.
Instead, I found out that using nginx could be used to forward to different server instances, thus completely separating the applications in each virtual environment.