[ckan-dev] Bye bye Pylons, hello Flask

Thu Jun 16 17:06:43 UTC 2016

Hi all,

Some of you might be aware that work has started to migrate the
current web framework that CKAN uses (Pylons) to a more modern (and
supported) alternative. After much discussion and weighing of the
options the choice was made to migrate to Flask.

As you can imagine, this is not going to be an easy task :)

CKAN has grown into a very big project, accumulating a certain amount
of technical debt on the way. Moreover, one of the main features of
CKAN is its extensibility via plugins, which adds another layer of
complexity. But it is a step that needs to be made to enable CKAN to
evolve and to make easier for developers to contribute.

My colleague Brook and I have been working on several proof of
concepts around this migration and have written down our findings and
plan on this wiki page:

https://github.com/ckan/ckan/wiki/Migration-from-Pylons-to-Flask

It also includes FAQs, description of the general approach and
implementation details, and we will update it regularly to keep track
of our progress.

It's a long read but if you have previous experience with Flask,
migrating of big code bases or just want to keep informed of how this
might affect your CKAN instance or extension please have a look and
feel free to ask **any** question you have or provide any feedback.
I've created an issue on the repo to make easier to discuss things:

https://github.com/ckan/ckan/issues/3119

And of course if you want to help in any way that would be also very welcome.

I'm sure that at the end we will have a better CKAN with many
opportunities ahead.

Cheers,

Adrià