How can I get my site to rerun some python flask code every time someone visits or every few minutes?

Question

This is my first time developing a website and I am coming across some issues. I have some python code that scrapes some data with beautifulsoup4 and displays the number on my site with flask. However, I found that my site does not automatically update the values at all, and rather only updates when I manually make my host reload.

How can I make it so that my python script "re-scrapes" every time a visitor visits my site, or just every 5 minutes or so? Any help would be greatly appreciated! emphasized text Host- Pythonanywhere

Here is my current backend python code:

import bs4 as bs
import urllib.request
from flask import Flask, render_template

app = Flask(__name__)

link = urllib.request.urlopen('https://www.health.pa.gov/topics/disease/coronavirus/Pages/Cases.aspx')
soup = bs.BeautifulSoup(link, 'lxml')

body = soup.find('body')  # get the body so you can do soup.find_all() inside it
tables = soup.find_all('table')

for table in tables:
    table_rows = table.find_all('tr')
    for tr in table_rows:
        td = tr.find_all('td')
        row = [i.text for i in td]
        if row.count('Bucks') > 0:
            print(row[1])
            # Bucksnum shows the amount of cases in bucks county,
            bucksnum = str(row[1])
            data = bucksnum




# this is the part that connects the flask file to the html file
@app.route("/")
def home():
    return render_template("template.html", data=data)


@app.route("/")
def index():
    return bucksnum


if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(host='0.0.0.0')

index()

Answer 1

You would need to use schedulers, check this thread that discusses a similar issue, you can use it to call a certain function that updates your data every interval of time.