Lombik

A scaffold engine for Flask — because starting from scratch is overrated.

Lombik exists to remove the boring parts of starting a Flask project. It gives you a ready-to-use structure so you can focus on building, not wiring things together.

It leans heavily into a hypermedia-first approach, using Jinja2, template filters, HTMX, and Tailwind to keep logic close to the UI and reduce frontend complexity.

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What you get out of the box

• Flask project structure pre-wired and ready to run
• Simple authentication system
• MySQL integration
• Tailwind + HTMX setup
• Error handling
• CSRF protection + session expiry
• Pre-imported common utilities
• Base templates for desktop and mobile

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Template filters (the fun part)

Lombik ships with a set of Jinja filters designed to keep your templates clean and expressive.

Dates & time handling

Instead of formatting timestamps in Python, you do it directly in the template:

{{ created_at | localtime }} → 2026-05-19 05:15
{{ created_at | onlydate }} → 2026-05-19
{{ created_at | onlytime }} → 05:15
{{ created_at | shortdatetime }} → May 19 05:15

Everything defaults to localtime, meaning UTC from the backend is automatically shown in the user’s timezone.

Lombik expects the user’s timezone to be available via g.

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String helpers

Make frontend display logic less painful:

{{ g.user.full_name | proper }}

john_doe → John Doe

{{ g.user.first_name | possessive }}

john → john's
lucas → lucas'

You can chain them:

{{ g.user.full_name | proper | possessive }}

john_doe → John Doe's

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Installation

pip install lombik

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Create a project

1. lombik createapp myapp
2. cd myapp
3. flask run --debug

This generates a full application structure so you can start immediately. To log in, you need a superuser account so you can exit the app and follow the next steps.

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Add modules

1. lombik module new_module

Creates a new module in blueprints that is registered automatically in app.py with the default file structure and a few core imports. The following names are prohibited by default: "core", "auth", "settings".

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Database setup

Lombik uses MySQL by default.

1. Update your .env with your database credentials (at least dev for development)
2. Initialize the database:

flask initdb

3. Create your admin user:

flask superuser

After that, you can log in and start building.

Note: the auth system is intentionally simple. It’s meant for development scaffolding, not production security.

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Models

When adding new models, don’t forget to register them:

models/__init__.py

Otherwise they won’t be picked up.