sssxrf/HAI-backend

HAI backend

Dependencies

1. Create virtual environment in the repository

python -m virtualenv venv

2. Activate virtual environment

Mac: source venv/bin/activate
Win: call venv/Scripts/activate.bat

3. Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

4. [During Development] Add new dependencies

pip freeze > requirements.txt

Note: this will overwrite the existing requirements file, so ensure that the requirements in the previous file are already installed in your virtualenv

Setup & run server

The server is a simple flask application. By default, you can only access flask from your localhost, but there are ways to workaround this. It is probably best for us to use ngrok, an application that creates a public tunnel to your machine. This way, the frontend will point to the public ngrok URL (that anyone can access, not just those on your localhost).

ngrok (required for public access,, not necessary for local development)

1. Create an ngrok account
2. Download the ngrok binary and move it into this repository: https://dashboard.ngrok.com/get-started/setup. Be sure to add your account key!

flask server

1. Ensure that you've sourced the virtual environment
2. run FLASK_ENV=development FLASK_APP=server.py flask run --host '0.0.0.0' --port 5000. This runs a flask application defined in server.py on the port 5000. You should be able to visit http://localhost:5000 in your web browser if this was successful. (for win run flask --app server run --debug )
3. [optional] expose local server to public-facing address via ngrok. Simply run ngrok http 5000 in a new terminal to create the tunnel. Documentation for ngrok is here: https://ngrok.com/docs/using-ngrok-with/flask/

production server

To run the production server, instead of running the flask command, we run a Waitress server. By simply running the command waitress-serve --call server:create_app, we tell waitress to call the create_app function in server.py file. By default, the host is 0.0.0.0 and port is 8080.