DevOps Apprenticeship: Project Exercise

System Requirements

The project uses poetry for Python to create an isolated environment and manage package dependencies. To prepare your system, ensure you have an official distribution of Python version 3.7+ and install poetry using one of the following commands (as instructed by the poetry documentation):

Poetry installation (Bash)

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/python-poetry/poetry/master/get-poetry.py | python

Poetry installation (PowerShell)

(Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://raw.githubusercontent.com/python-poetry/poetry/master/get-poetry.py -UseBasicParsing).Content | python

Dependencies

The project uses a virtual environment to isolate package dependencies. To create the virtual environment and install required packages, run the following from your preferred shell:

$ poetry install

You'll also need to clone a new .env file from the .env.tempalate to store local configuration options. This is a one-time operation on first setup:

$ cp .env.template .env  # (first time only)

The .env file is used by flask to set environment variables when running flask run. This enables things like development mode (which also enables features like hot reloading when you make a file change). There's also a SECRET_KEY variable which is used to encrypt the flask session cookie.

Running the App

Once the all dependencies have been installed, start the Flask app in development mode within the poetry environment by running:

$ poetry run flask run

You should see output similar to the following:

 * Serving Flask app "app" (lazy loading)
 * Environment: development
 * Debug mode: on
 * Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)
 * Restarting with fsevents reloader
 * Debugger is active!
 * Debugger PIN: 226-556-590

Now visit http://localhost:5000/ in your web browser to view the app.