Eve: Building RESTful APIs with MongoDB and Flask Transcripts
Chapter: Fine-tuning your REST service
Lecture: Deploying your service
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0:00
So far we've been using the Flask builtin server for running our apps.
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Now while it is lightweight and easy to use,
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Flask's builtin server is not suitable for production
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as it doesn't scale well and by default it only serves one request at a time.
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Some options available for properly running Flask in production
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are documented on the Flask website.
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On the website you'll find instructions
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on how to host your app on all kinds of services
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or you can find instructions on how to set up Flask
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on your own self hosting environment.
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In this lecture, we'll learn how to run our app on Gunicorn.
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Gunicorn stands for green unicorn,
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it's a wsgi http server for unix.
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Actually, a pre fork worker model ported from Ruby's unicorn project.
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The good news is that running a Flask app on this service is very simple
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Gunicorn comes as a standard Python package
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so all we have to do is pip install it in our environment.
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Now that it is installed, all we have to do is launch it,
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pass the name of the launch script
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and within the launch script what is the object holding the wsgi app.
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So in our case the app.py script contains an apt object
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and boom, we're done, the server is running on local host port 8000.
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Now Gunicorn comes with a number
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of interesting and powerful command line options
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the most useful probably are
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-w which allows us to specify the number of workers.
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And that should be where we can say what is the port we want to listen to.
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So in this example, I'm launching our app with 4 workers
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and the listening on port 4000.
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Right. As you can see, we have 4 workers,
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1, 2, 3, and 4 all listening to local host port 4000.
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Let's go to Postman and try to send a request.
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to our port endpoint people— it works.
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That's it, of course, you have many more options.
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Gunicorn is just one of the many options you have,
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but surely it could be a nice starting point,
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and it also offers very good performances.
