FVANG

Flask-Vagrant-Ansible-Nginx-Gunicorn Starter Pack

This is a starter pack for quickly developing a new Flask project locally with Vagrant, which is then easily deployed into production with Ansible. It installs and configures all the services you'll need:

• Vagrant VM based on Ubuntu 18.04
• Python 3.6 virtualenv for your Flask app and its dependencies
• Nginx to serve static files and proxy to Gunicorn
• Supervisor to automatically start/restart Gunicorn
• Node.js for installing front-end components (optional)

Features

• Disposable environment is fully self-contained within the Vagrant VM
• Ansible playbooks for both local development and production
• Develop with Flask dev server, then test/deploy with Gunicorn/Nginx
• Easily add Ansible galaxy roles (ansible/requirements.yml)
• Activates Python virtualenv on login
• Installs Python packages from requirements.txt
• Installs Node packages from package.json

Shortcuts

• activate - activate the virtualenv
• deactivate - deactivate the virtualenv
• make run - run Flask development server
• make restart - start/restart Gunicorn & Nginx
• make provision-dev - run playbook for dev (must deactivate virtualenv)
• make provision-prod - run playbook production (must deactivate virtualenv)

Local Development

0. Install Vagrant

1. Clone this repo as your project name: (This is important, the project folder name will be used for configuring hostname, etc.)

   git clone git@github.com:paste/fvang.git my-project-name

2. Build your Vagrant VM:

   vagrant up

3. Log into the VM via SSH:

   vagrant ssh

4. Start Flask development server:

   cd my-project-name
   make run

5. Modify your computer's local /etc/hosts:

   192.168.33.11   my-project-name.local
   

6. Visit your app:

   http://my-project-name.local
   

7. Profit ✔️

In Production

0. You'll need a remote user with sudo privileges to run Ansible.

1. Edit the host_name and other settings in ansible/prod.yml as necessary.

2. Clone your project onto the server in your remote user's home folder, e.g. ~/my-project-name

3. Install Ansible with the included script:

   cd ~/my-project-name
   sudo ansible/install.sh

4. Install Ansible Galaxy roles:

   make install-galaxy-roles

5. Run the Ansible production playbook:

   make provision-prod

6. Profit ✔️

HTTPS in Production

0. To use HTTPS you will need an SSL certificate. Get one from Certbot here: https://certbot.eff.org/lets-encrypt/ubuntubionic-nginx

1. Copy the certificate and key to your remote user's home folder. The Nginx configuration expects the files to be named after the host_name, like this:

   ~/fvang.io.crt
   ~/fvang.io.key
   

2. Update the production playboook to use SSL, in ansible/prod.yml:

   nginx_use_ssl: true

3. Re-run the Ansible production playbook:

   make provision-prod

4. Profit ✔️