Localhost AWS

Requirements and dependencies

Python3
Pip - The python package manager.
Flask - A simple and flexible Python Web Framework that provides with tools, libraries and technologies to build a web application. (Installed by pip)

Database requirements

Locally, install MariaDB.
On AWS, MySQL is used and the mysqlclient connector is used.

Clone the project

Use the command below:

git clone https://github.com/MLH/mlh-localhost-build-and-deploy-aws.git

Set Up Environment variables

To quickly set up environment variables, make a copy of the .env.example and rename it to .env. Then make sure to modify it following the instructions below.

Yelp API Key

Create a Yelp account
Create an app at https://www.yelp.ca/developers/v3/manage_app
Copy the API key to the .env

YELP_AUTH_TOKEN=

Database URL

This allows you to use a custom database url and will be useful for local tests (The app is currently configured to support a custom Postgres or Mysql database). This won't be necessary to deploy the app to AWS, as we will use an RDS instance that Elastic Beanstalk configures for us. See the "Adding a database to Your Elastic Beanstalk Environment" section below for more details.

DATABASE_URL=

The format should be something like:

DATABASE_URL=mysql://USER:PASSWORD@ENDPOINT/DATABASE_NAME

For a local development server, the url could look something like:

DATABASE_URL=mysql://littlejohnnydroptables:amaz1ngpa33word@localhost/events

Install dependencies

The next step is to install the dependencies used by the project. Run the following command:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Executing the application

After having all the dependencies installed, you only need to execute the main application file. In this case it will be the file "main.py"

FLASK_APP=application.py FLASK_DEBUG=1 flask run

Then open http://localhost:5000/ to see the application.

Deploying to AWS Elastic Beanstalk

We will use awswebcli to deploy our app to AWS.

Install awswebcli

pip install awsebcli

Initialize your APP

After installing awswebcli, the first thing we need to do is to initialize our app within AWS.

Initialize your Elastic Beanstalk with:

eb init

This will prompt you with a number of questions to help you configure your environment.

Do you wish to continue with CodeCommit?

Select No (N)

Default region

As this is an example application, we can choose keep the default option selected.

Credentials

Next, it’s going to ask for your AWS credentials.

If needed, you can follow this guide to set up your IAM account

Application name

This will default to the directory name. Just go with that.

Python version

Choose any Python 3+ version

SSH

Say yes to setting up SSH for your instances.

RSA Keypair

Next, you need to generate an RSA keypair, which will be added to your ~/.ssh folder. This keypair will also be uploaded to the EC2 public key for the region you specified in step one. This will allow you to SSH into your EC2 instance later in this tutorial.

Adding a database to Your Elastic Beanstalk Environment

Open your console management by running

eb console

Then follow this guide to set up your Amazon RDS within your app. The app expects an RDS MySQL database.

Create an environment

eb create

Just like eb init, this command will prompt you with a series of questions.

Environment Name

Name your environment. localhost-aws-test for instance.

DNS CNAME prefix

This will be your subdomain. You can keep the default value, or use your environment name.

Configuring YELP Auth Token