Getting Started

First create a new account, new database in mongodb atlas cloud and get the connection string, use this video as reference. Add your connection string to app.config["MONGO_URI"] in app.py

Step 1

Open up windows powershell as Administrator, navigate to your\path\to\flask-api-boilerplate

cd your\path\to\flask-api-boilerplate

Step 2

Execute command python -m venv env to create a python virtual environment wait until it is created.

Execute command .\env\Scripts\activate to activate virtual environment (if Powershell gives you an error as “execution of scripts is disabled on this system.”, run this command first -> Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned)

Execute command pip install -r .\requirements.txt to install requirements

Step 3

Execute flask run to start application. (or executing python .\app.py should also work)

While doing this if you run into an error like "Error: Could not locate flask application. You did not provide the FLASK_APP environment variable", execute this command first -> $env:FLASK_APP = "run.py"

Step 4 (Test POST Method)

Open up postman and send POST request to http://127.0.0.1:5000/query with Json body as,

{
    "queryId": 90030072,
    "field1": "example1",
    "field2": "example2",
    "field3": "example3"
}

If everyting is configured properly, you should get a 201 responce as,

{
    "message": "Query added successfully",
    "query": 90030072
}

Check database and respective collection to verify.

Step 5 (Test GET Method)

Now let's retrieve the record we just added. Send a GET request to http://127.0.0.1:5000/get/90030072, if everything is configured properly you should get,

[
    {
        "field1": "example1",
        "field2": "example2",
        "field3": "example3"
    }
]

Step 6 (Deploy)

Create an account on Heroku, download and install Heroku CLI

Execute command heroku login and enter credentials to login to Hiroku CLI.

Execute command heroku create your-app-name to create a new application. (https://your-app-name.hirokuapp.com will be your URL)

Step 6 (Deploy cont.)

Now execute following commands one after the other. (change your-app-name in line 2 to the name you have given in the previous step)

git init
heroku git:remote -a your-app-name
git add .
git commit -m "initial commit"
git push heroku master

Last command will push your code to heroku platform and start deploying. Hereafter whenever you want to create a new build, just execute last 3 commands only, i.e.

git add .
git commit -m "initial commit"
git push heroku master

Optional command heroku logs --tail to view realtime logs of the deployement server.

Next Steps

• Deploy Machine Learning Model using Flask
• Deployment of NLP Model in Heroku Cloud