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Installation

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Oliver Köhler edited this page Aug 29, 2022 · 5 revisions

In general there are multiple ways to install MyFestival on a server. Detailed guides for deployment on Linux, Heroku and Docker are part of Miguel Grinberg's Flask Mega-Tutorial:

If you want to deploy the app on your own Linux server please note, that using Postgres instead of MySQL is recommended!

This article focuses on the specific deployment details of MyFestival on Heroku. It is possible to connect your Heroku account directly with Github. However, since this is not mandatory, we will focus on deployment via the Heroku CLI.

Git preparations

First of all you need to set up the repository on the machine from which you are deploying the app:

git clone https://github.com/olk90/myfestival.git
cd myfestival
git checkout <tag>

The <tag> to check out is the version of the app, you want to deploy (s. current releases). It is recommended to deploy always the latest version!

Configure Heroku

In the following sections you will find a detailed description of the whole configuration necessary to deploy the app to Heroku.

TLDR; Use the scripts

Most of the steps are automated by the script prepare_heroku.sh in the repository.

./prepare_heroku.sh <unique-name> <region>

The <unique-name> must be replaced with a unique name, since it will be part of the application's URL https://<unique-name>.herokuapp.com/. The <region> must be either eu or us.

After executing the script, you can continue with the deployment.

Creating the app

heroku apps:create <unique-name> --region eu

As mentioned in the last section, the <unique-name> must be replaced with a unique name. Also the region flag is optional, but if it was not set, the default region (US) will be used.

Postgres

To use Postgres in Heroku you need to add the plugin first. This command will also set the environment variable DATABASE_URL which is needed by the application to access the database.

heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev

As mentioned in Miguel's blog post, the database URL expected by SQL Alchemy has another prefix, than the one used by Heroku. Therefore you need to set a variable PLATFORM to the value HEROKU, so the prefix can be replaced by the app itself:

heroku config:set PLATFORM=HEROKU

Setting this environment varaible will also configure the application's logger which is done in the blog post by setting the variable LOG_TO_STDOUT!

Setting other environment variables

The following code block contains all other environment variables necessary to run the application:

### initial password for the admin account. CHANGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER FIRST LOGIN!
heroku config:set INITIAL_ADMIN_PW=<password_of_your_choice> 

### run the flask commands from Procfile
heroku config:set FLASK_APP=myfestival.py

### set secret key
heroku config:set SECRET_KEY=<random string, that is hard to guess>

To set the SECRET_KEY it is recommended, to use any random string generator.

Deployment

During preparations a specific version tag has been checked out from the repository. In order to deploy the app, the repository must be on a branch, which is created by the following command:

git checkout -b deploy

After that the change must be pushed to Heroku by exectuting

git push heroku deploy:main

For further information please check out former mentioned blogpost.

First Login

After the deployment succeeded the app will be available under the URL https://<unique-name>.herokuapp.com/ (depending on the unique name chosen during the initialization).

The Procfile triggers the creation of an inital admin account named admin. The initial password for this accound has been set in the environment variable INITIAL_ADMIN_PW. It is recommended, that you change this password immediately after the first login. The account's name might be changed as well. Find more information about that in the Account Management guide.

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