I used the answer to this question to fix a circular import when setting up Flask-SQLAlchemy.  The solution works because you don't have to import the app from the application.py file to get the database URI - it initalizes the connection just before running the app.  The issue now is that I typically like import my models file into a python interpreter just so I can test the models (and the connection to the database) without actually running the app.  But with this setup, just importing models won't establish a connection to PostGres.
Is there a way to establish a connection to PostGres through Flask-SQLAlchemy without actually initializing and running an app?  Maybe I can provide db with the URI to my database directly?
 
     
     
    