Flask Series: Deployment

Flask Series

1. Prepare the Environment
2. Structure the Application
3. Application Configuration
4. Templating
5. Model
6. Testing
7. Views and Web Forms
8. Error Management
9. Security
10. Optimizations
11. Healthcheck and Monitoring
12. Internationalization
13. Deployment

I will describe a setup with nginx as a web server on a Ubuntu environment. A web server cannot communicate directly with Flask, that’s why gunicorn will be used to act as a medium between the web server and the Flask application. Gunicorn is like application web server that will be running behind nginx, it is WSGI compatible. It can communicate with applications that support WSGI – Flask, Django.

Installation

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y python python-pip nginx gunicorn

Setup

Create a directory to store the project

sudo mkdir /home/www && cd /home/www

Clone the project from the GitHub repository and copy the application to the /home/www directory.

git clone https://github.com/damyanbogoev/flask-bookshelf.git /tmp/
cd /tmp/flask-bookshelf
cp -r ./* /home/www/

Install the application requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Nginx configuration

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx start
sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
sudo touch /etc/nginx/sites-available/flask_bookshelf
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/flask_bookshelf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/flask_bookshelf
sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/flask_bookshelf

The gunicorn will use port 8000 and handle the incoming HTTP requests. You could add a separate configuration for the static files of the Flask application, because it is better to be served directly by nginx.

Restart the nginx to load the later configuration changes:

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart

Run the gunicorn on port 8000

/home/www/flask_bookshelf/
gunicorn --bind 0.0.0.0:8000 run:app