Deployment

Ways of deploying the application

Deploying with Waitress & Cloudflare

Waitress is a production-quality WSGI server that can be used to run your Flask application. Here's how you can run your application with Waitress and have it hosted by Cloudflare:

1. Activate the Python virtual environment:

   # If you're on macOS or Linux:
   source env/bin/activate
   
   # If you're on Windows:
   .\env\Scripts\activate

2. Install Waitress:

   pip install waitress

3. Navigate to your application's directory and run Wrapper.py:

   cd path/to/your/application

   python main.py

   or

   python wrapper.py

   Replace path/to/your/application with the actual path to your application's directory.

   By default, I have waitress set to use 4 threads. If you want to change this, edit this line in 'server.py' to the amount of threads you want.

   return subprocess.Popen(['waitress-serve', '--port=5000', '--threads=4', 'main:app'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)

   The application will now be available at http://localhost:5000.

4. Configure Cloudflare:

   Go to your Cloudflare dashboard, add your domain, and update your DNS records to point to your server's IP address and port 5000. Make sure your SSL/TLS encryption mode is set to "Full".

Deploying to Heroku

This application is designed to be easily deployable to Heroku. It uses the DATABASE_URL environment variable to configure the database, and automatically converts postgres:// URLs to postgresql:// URLs, which are required by SQLAlchemy.

To deploy the application to Heroku, you can use the Heroku CLI:

heroku create
git push heroku master
heroku open