Where does my sqlite database go?

Question

This might be a dumb question, but I'm kind of confused as to how SQLAlchemy works with the actual database being used by my Flask application. I have a python file, models.py that defines a SQLAlchemy database schema, and then I have this part of my code that creates the database for it

if __name__ == '__main__':
    from datetime import timedelta

    from sqlalchemy import create_engine
    from sqlalchemy.orm import sessionmaker

    engine = create_engine('sqlite://', echo=True)

    Base.metadata.create_all(engine)
    Session = sessionmaker(bind=engine)
    session = Session()

    # Add a sample user
    user = User(name='Philip House', password="test")
    session.add(user)
    session.commit()

I run that file and it works fine, but now I'm confused to as what happens with the database..how can I access it in another application? I've also heard that it might just be in memory, and if that is the case, how do I make it a permanent database file I can use my application with?

Also in my application, this is how I refer to my sqlite database in the config file:

PWD = os.path.abspath(os.curdir)
DEBUG=True
SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = 'sqlite:///{}/arkaios.db'.format(PWD)

I dunno if that might be of any help.

Thanks!!

Answer 1

Here are the docs for connection to SQLAlchemy with SQLite.

As you guessed, you are in fact creating a SQLite database in memory when you use sqlite:// as your connection string. If you were to use sqlite:///{}/arkaios.db'.format(PWD) you would create a new database in your current directory. If this is what you intend to do so that you can access that database from other applications then you should import your connections string from your configuration file and use that instead of sqlite://.