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NoAppException: The file/path provided (autoapp) does not appear to exist.

See original GitHub issue

I’ve followed the README for this project but flask.cli keeps throwing me this exception when I try to run flask.

NoAppException: The file/path provided (autoapp) does not appear to exist.  Please 
verify the path is correct.  If app is not on PYTHONPATH, ensure the extension is .py

StackOverflow seems to think it’s an issue with exporting FLASK_APP=autoapp.py vs FLASK_APP=autoapp. I’ve tried them both in addition to using the absolute path for the above two variations.

Any thoughts how I can fix this?

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 7 years ago
Reactions:2
Comments:12

Top GitHub Comments

6reactions

nick13jaremekcommented, Feb 17, 2017

Hello there.

I was struggling with a similar issue as @rsivapr and it had me investigating a while. However, my issue was a bit more sutile:

Also on Ubuntu, version 16.04.
Created a fresh virtualenv, installing the dependencies specified in the requirements.txt file of the cookie-cutter-based Flask repo I’m working on.
Exported the Flask env variables as stated by @gitmeister: FLASK_APP=autoapp.py and FLASK_DEBUG=1.
Had the autoapp.py file located in the same directory I was within my terminal session.
Launched flask app via the flask run command.
Entered localhost:5000 on my web browser.
Got the following error message:

NoAppException: The file/path provided (autoapp) does not appear to exist.  Please verify the path is correct.  If app is not on PYTHONPATH, ensure the extension is .py

Then I tried the following: running python autoapp.py to check its output. It turns out I got a quite helpful message, that pointed me out to the ultimate error:

ImportError: No module named requests

Finally, I ran pip freeze to confirm I did not have the requests module in the list, neither in the requirements.txt file.

The solution was to add the requests module to the requirements.txt file and run pip install again within the proper virtualenv.

Although the issue in the end could be considered similar to @rsivapr’s, I wonder why the flask run command does not yield a more descriptive error message.

I hope this Github issue comments, along with this one, help other Flask users when facing a similar error.

6reactions

jordan-wrightcommented, Dec 28, 2016

This happened to me when I had a circular import.

You can try to debug by opening the console on the Traceback page and running the command __import__(app_id). If there’s an error on the import, you’ll see it there.