Welcome to Flask-Live-Starter
Developing a Flask application locally is easy. However, getting it up and running on production infrastructure is harder.
Flask-Live-Starter prescribes a set of best-of-breed infrastructure components that make deploying to VPS instances a snap. It includes Fabric tasks that automate provisioning, deployment, and common post-deployment operations (database backup and log tailing). Deploy early and easily with Flask-Live-Starter!
Introduction
Flask-Live-Starter is a boilerplate Flask application with Fabric tasks that automate the installation and provisioning of:
- A Linux box (Debian)
- A WSGI server (Gunicorn)
- An HTTPD server (Nginx)
- An SSL certificate (LetsEncrypt)
- A database server (Postgresql)
- An in-memory cache (Redis)
- A firewall (UFW)
In addition to provisioning your application's environment, Flask-Live-Starter makes it a snap to:
- Deploy your Flask application
- Backup your production database
- Tail your production logs
Flask-Live-Starter is all about backend provisioning and deployment. It makes no assumptions about and gives no guidance on front-end frameworks. It only focuses on server-side code, so you're free to use JQuery, Angular, Bootstrap, or whatever you wish.
Quickstart
Let's setup a new application named myapp.
Download flask-live-starter
git clone https://github.com/johnwheeler/flask-live-starter myapp
rm -rf myapp/.git
Prepare your local development environment
cd myapp
virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
Configure your application for development
cp fabfile/settings.py.example fabfile/settings.py
nano fabfile/settings.py
cp app/settings.cfg.example app/settings.cfg
nano app/settings.cfg
createuser <app_name> -P
createdb <app_name> -O <app_name>
# where <app_name> is the value of env._app_name in fabfile/settings.py
python app/views.py
Prepare the remote server
fab install.system install.postgres install.redis
fab provision.firewall provision.database
fab remote.deploy
fab provision.certificate
Fabric Tasks
The fabric tasks are broken into four namespaces that each focus on a separate deployment concern.
install
is for installing system components including the stack for serving Flask apps, Postgresql, and Redisprovision
is for provisioning a certificate, a firewall, and a databaseremote
includes tasks to deploy your application, backup your database, and tail and grep logslocal
has one task that restores the latest backup to your local development database so you can work off your production dataset.