/flask-on-aca

Primary LanguageHTMLMIT LicenseMIT

Deploy a Python (Flask) app to Azure to Azure Containers Apps

This Python web app is a simple restaurant review application built with the Flask framework. The web app stores application data in PostgreSQL with environment variables defining the connection info.

This repo was created to be built to a Docker image and run as a container instance in Azure Container Apps. For more information, see the tutorial [Deploy a Python web app on Azure Container Apps with GitHub Actions][https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/developer/python/tutorial-deploy-python-web-app-azure-container-apps-01].

This Python web app repo can also be used in other ways:

If you need an Azure account, you can create on for free.

A Django sample application with similar functionality is at https://github.com/Azure-Samples/msdocs-python-django-azure-container-apps.

Requirements

The requirements.txt has the following packages:

Package Description
Flask Web application framework.
SQLAlchemy Provides a database abstraction layer to communicate with PostgreSQL.
Flask-SQLAlchemy Adds SQLAlchemy support to Flask application by simplifying using SQLAlchemy. Requires SQLAlchemy.
Flask-Migrate SQLAlchemy database migrations for Flask applications using Alembic. Allows functionality parity with Django version of this sample app.
pyscopg2-binary PostgreSQL database adapter for Python.
gunicorn WSGI HTTP Server for UNIX. Required for running containers locally in VS Code.
python-dotenv Read key-value pairs from .env file and set them as environment variables. In this sample app, environment variables describe how to connect to the database and storage resources. Because managed identity is used no sensitive information is included in environment variables.

Flask's dotenv support sets environment variables automatically from an .env file.
flask_wtf Form rendering, validation, and CSRF protection for Flask with WTForms. Uses CSRFProtect extension.

The steps to do this are covered more completely in the tutorial [Deploy a Python web app on Azure Container Apps with GitHub Actions][https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/developer/python/tutorial-deploy-python-web-app-azure-container-apps-01]. Briefly, here are the steps:

  1. Fork and then clone locally.
  2. Build a container image from the repo.
  3. Create a PostgreSQL Flexible Server instance.
  4. Create a database on the server.
  5. Deploy the web app container to Azure Container Apps.
  6. Configure continuous deployment.

See the create_resources.sh Bash script for automating the creation of these steps.