I have been studying Flask web framework for some time. Today I decide to write a simple app and deploy it to a Digital Ocean web server under my control. The Flask app itself is very simple. It is a temperature converter which converts temperature in fahrenheit to celsius. The source code is on github and the link is here. You can access the live app via this link.
The flask app follows the guidance on Miguel Grinberg’s Flask Web Development book. The only difference is that I used Flask-BS4 instead of Flask-Bootstrap package because Flask-Bootstrap is still based on Bootstrap 3. It does not have a database backend.
The web server already have a nginx server installed and configured for a static website. I followed this medium article to setup the nginx server and letsencrypt certification. At the time I set up the server, I did not really understand what I was doing. A few weeks ago I found this nginx setting article which details nginx settings very well. I added a location block to pass along (so called reverse proxy) http requests to the gunicorn WSGI server.
location /convert {
proxy_pass http://localhost:8001;
proxy_redirect off;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
}
The setting code above is from Miguel Grinberg’s Flask Mega-Tutorial Chapter 17. I followed step-by-step guides in this Chapter to set up tools on the server. I thought about setting up Docker containers, but decided not to do so after reading the chapter a few times. The main reason is that the Docker containers will incur a significant overhead on a $5/mo Digital Ocean server.
William Shotts’ book The Linux Command Line has a section on ssh, scp and sftp. It has a sentence “the SFTP protocol is supported by many of the graphical file managers found in Linux distributions.” I found FileZilla is easy to setup and easy to transfer files between a local computer and the server.