Flask says "did not provide the FLASK_APP environment variable"

I'm trying to run a Flask application with flask run but no matter what, I receive this error:

Error: Could not locate Flask application. You did not provide the FLASK_APP environment variable.

I'm using virtualenv in my project and I'm running the app on port 80 so I run the command as superuser. Ultimately, I just need to use the flask db init command as described in Flask-Migrate's docs, but flask needs to be able to find the app to do that. Here's what I've tried, with no success:

Exporting the FLASK_APP environment variable, ensuring that it's in my bash profile, then activating virtualenv

$ export FLASK_APP=run.py
$ printenv FLASK_APP
run.py
$ . env/bin/activate
(env) $ sudo flask run
Error: Could not locate Flask application. You did not provide the     FLASK_APP environment variable.

Activating virtualenv, then exporting FLASK_APP

$ . env/bin/activate
(env) $ export FLASK_APP=run.py
(env) $ printenv FLASK_APP
run.py
(env) sudo flask run
Error: Could not locate Flask application. You did not provide the     FLASK_APP environment variable.

The above two with the full path, /Users/me/code/project/run.py

$ printenv FLASK_APP
/Users/me/code/project/run.py

Project Structure

myproject/
    ├──app/
    |  ├── __init__.py
    |  ├── models.py
    |  ├── templates/
    |  └── views.py
    ├── tests/
    ├── run.py
    ├── requirements.txt
    └── config.py

So far nothing has worked and the error message is the same in each case. What can I do to fix this error?

Solution

When I drop sudo from sudo flask run, Flask finds $FLASK_APP. However, I get the error message socket.error: [Errno 13] Permission denied. I can't see a way around this, as Flask cannot find $FLASK_APP when I run as superuser. Seems like circular logic.

I've managed to run Flask by changing the port from 80 to 5000 and dropping sudo with flask run. This is fine, I will have to find a way to run the app on port 80 in production though.

I was able to run flask db init after dropping and recreating my database, and removing calls to db.create_all.

Edit - 4/27/17 port 80 was indeed blocked by the firewall on my server (the firewall is beyond my control) so running the app on an open port resolved the issue.