For this test project, I've decided to try Flask as the web application and Docker for deployment.

This cookiecutter Flask template was used: https://github.com/sloria/cookiecutter-flask

I had no prior experience with Flask so this template was of great help. I wanted to have an idea about best practices and a sample project up and running. I used https://github.com/pydanny/cookiecutter-django for other projects before, so I grabbed a lot of things from there for Docker deployment.

I ended up using a MethodView (http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/1.0/views/#method-views-for-apis) for the API and WTForms for the form.

The following tutorial helped a lot for getting up to speed with the backend: https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/the-flask-mega-tutorial-part-i-hello-world. The frontend is heavily based on another of his tutorials, a rather old one: https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/writing-a-javascript-rest-client

A lot could be improved, main points I'd work on next:

• Frontend testing
• Decouple Frontend/Backend, serve static files and API endpoints only. Use Webpack. Right now the homepage renders a form via Flask, this shouldn't be needed.
• After inserting/updating a feature, the API endpoint returns a list of all features for convenience. It should only return the modified features.

On a terminal, bring up the docker containers.

$ docker-compose -f local.yml up --build

Migrate the database on another terminal.

$ docker-compose -f local.yml run --rm flask-test flask db upgrade

Run backend tests.

$ docker-compose -f local.yml run --rm flask-test flask test

You can navigate to http://localhost:5000 to use the application.

Copy .envs/local/.env to .envs/production/.env

You'll need to make some modifications to the copied file:

Change the FLASK_ENV variable to production.

FLASK_ENV=production

Change the secret key.

SECRET_KEY="not-so-secret"

Change the Postgres credentials.

POSTGRES_USER=flasktest POSTGRES_PASSWORD=flasktest POSTGRES_DB_NAME=flasktest

Create an EC2 instance with Docker Machine. You'll need your AWS credentials configured, see https://docs.docker.com/machine/examples/aws/

$ docker-machine create --driver amazonec2 flasktest

Set your environment variables to use docker-compose with this Docker Machine.

$ eval $(docker-machine env flasktest)

Bring up the services.

$ docker-compose -f production.yml up --build -d

Get the Docker Machine's IP address and navigate to it.

$ docker-machine ip flasktest