Moving to AWS. The journey.

I had started learning Flask and felt that a good way to practice it would be redesigning my site with it.

It was pretty easy and the documentation was really good. As a Pythonista, I loved it. The only problem I had was that my hosting provider was GoDaddy(a blunder that I committed in my early days) and that meant hosting a Flask app was impossible. Luckily for me, my hosting plan with GoDaddy was going to expire pretty soon and I was looking for other hosting providers.

I had been given a 100 dollar credit on Amazon Web Services in a hackathon and I decided to give it a try. I host some of my applications on Heroku and I thought migrating completely to AWS might make it a lot simpler and give me more control. Plus, having to setup everything from scratch made it interesting and I was all set for the task.

The initial setup on AWS like installing Apache, Flask were simple.

I just had to run a few commands like

• sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-wsgi
• wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py; python get-pip.py
• pip install flask
• pip install flask-flatpages

The next step was to get the Flask app up and running with Apache. This is where I ran into some troubles as most tutorials and documentations that I could find online were leading to 500 or 404 errors. I played around for several hours and finally managed to get it to work. These were the steps I followed:

• sudo su
• cd /var/www
• git clone urlto://git.repo (say flaskapp)
• cd flaskapp

After this, create a name.wsgi file where name is the name of the file containing the app = Flask(__name__) line.

The contents of the name.wsgi file should be as follows:

import sys
sys.path.insert(0, '/var/www/flaskapp')

from app import app as application

Then, run the following commands:

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available

nano amazonaws.com.conf

Type the following contents into the amazonaws.com.conf file:

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName  'Public DNS of your EC2 Instance'
    WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/flaskapp/name.wsgi
    <Directory /var/www/flaskapp/>
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    LogLevel info
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

After this, enable the Flask app by disabling the default Apache page and enabling the newly created one.

• a2dissite default
• a2ensite amazonaws.com.conf
• /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

And voila, the app should now be live and you can access it using your EC2 instance's public DNS.