I'm attempting to build an application that runs locally on a user's computer. It takes inputs and displays information, so I thought a nice way to make it work would be to have a Flask server that handles web forms, etc, to gather user input, and to display database contents in tables.
The service works when I run the Flask development server, and everything is fine and dandy, but I want to compile the entire project into a single executable file.
My questions are as follows:
Is it possible for me to have the flask server automatically start up and open the portal page when I double-click the EXE
Assuming this is a feasible concept, how would I go about compiling the exe? A brief look through the pyinstaller documentation does not tell me how I would compile a folder (which in this case would be more of a Python package), which would be a necessary pre-requisite considering that Flask has static and template folders containing my HTML, CSS, and JS files, not to mention the fact that my file tree is built in a modular manner.
Am I approaching this the wrong way? Would it be better to build a "launcher" application that runs Flask as a Windows service (vis a vis this question) instead of attempting to have an all-in-one EXE?
For reference, my file tree looks something like this:
Application
|_static
|_templates
|_\templates\errors
|_\templates\forms
|_errors
|_database
|_\database\connections
|_\database\iohandlers
|_"__init__.py"
|_"app.py"
While doing research on this, I came across this answer but as my situation doesn't mesh with the model that the OP had laid out, I thought it would be pertinent and useful to ask another question.
Related
thanks in advance
I have a nginx server in which i am running python tornado application server. My tornado server conatins api endpoints(Handler), Models (DB table models) and the code for their respective services. We are using it as a backend service for an app that sells goods. Recently, we have implemented a complain feature that lets you upload image for the products.
I have to write code in python to convert base64 image into actual jpg/png (which is done), and then upload it to a different windows server(i m stuck in uploading part). I have been researching about it and found a few ways like
FTP
by RemoteDesktopConnection (it is clearly not for me)
and a few more.
if there is any better way to do this plz tell. i am not really experienced so plz explain your answers in a bit detail. Thank you for your time.
previously i was storing it in my application server which is clearly not a good thing to do and i was not able to expose the url for images also.
If it just needs to be a file in a directory on the other windows server, one could turn on file sharing for the specific directory on the other windows server and then smb mount that directory onto your application server. Then your python code could simply write a file to that directory.
A fairly good guide for doing this can be found here
Note that in a final production environment you want to be sure that the security is set appropriately (which is beyond the scope of this question).
I've never worked with Django before so forgive me if a question sounds stupid.
I need to develop a web application, but I do not want to deploy it on a server. I need to package it, so that others would "install" it on their machine and run it. Why I want to do it this way? There are many reasons, which I don't want to go into right now. My question is: can I do it? If yes, then how?
This is possible. However, the client machine would need to be equipped with the correct technologies for this to work.
When you launch a web app on a server (live), the server is required to have certain settings and installs. For example, a Django web app: the server must have a version of Django installed.
Hence, whichever machine is running your web app, must have Django installed. It presumably also needs to have the database too. It might be quite a hassling process but it's possible.
Just like as a developer, you may have multiple users working on 1 project. So, they all need to have that project 'installed' on their devices so they can run it locally.
You need to either use a python to executable program, with Django already in it. The website files you can place into the dist folder or whatever folder has the executable in it. Then you can compress it and share it with others (who have the same OS as you).
For an example:
You have this script in Django (I'm too lazy to actually write one), and you want to share it with someone who doesn't have Python and Django on his/her computer.
This is a bit embarassing, but I'm a Django noob and I couldn't find a simple solution to this:
I have written a Django app in a local VM that I now want to deploy to a "production" server. App works like a charm locally.
Now my IT colleague has set up the server with Django and that also works fine. I can open it via the Web and I get the usual "Congratulations on your first Django-powered page". I can also log into the admin interface. The project has been created.
This is a very low-key mini project and I'm not too familiar with git, so we've decided to just push files via FTP. (And I want to stick with that if at all possible.) So I uploaded the app folder into the project folder and also adjusted the project's settings.py and urls.py.
However, nothing seems to be happening on the server's end. The welcome page is the same, the app does not show up in the admin interface and the URLs won't be resolved as hoped.
Any suggestions what I should have done / done differently?
You need to restart apache or whatever is running your django project. Your changes to py files are cached when you first load your server config (settings).
Any suggestions what I should have done / done differently?
You should be using git/jenkins/deployment techniques, I know you said you've decided not to use it but you're going to be missing out on important things like being able to keep track of changes and unit testing
I have a Python 2.7 script at https://github.com/jhsu802701/dopplervalueinvesting . When I run the screen.py script locally, the end result is a new screen-output sub-directory (within the root directory) and a results.csv file within it.
What I'm trying to do is put this script on a remote server, run this screen.py script every night, and make the results.csv file publicly readable.
I've tried to do this on Google App Engine, but I can't get it to work. The Google App Engine tutorial revolves around trying to dynamically create a web site, and I haven't been able to figure out how to make anything other than an index.html file in the root directory work. HOW DO I MAKE OTHER FILES PUBLICLY READABLE?
Is Google App Engine the way to go, or am I barking up the wrong tree? I understand that another route is using WebFaction, a web hosting provider that offers a whole Linux system. (Running my app on my current web host, MDDHosting, is not an option because lxml is not available without a much more costly VPS.)
In summary, my questions are:
How do I run my Python script in Google App Engine and make the output results.csv file publicly available?
If Google App Engine isn't the solution for me, should I use WebFaction? (I already tried Heroku, and it didn't work for me.)
What are my other options?
I'm willing to pay for a solution, but only if I get web hosting as well. (I'm not willing to pay for MDDHosting for my dopplervalueinvesting.com web site AND another host for running my script.)
I think GAE should be good for what you want, but you may need to work differently because, as a comment pointed out, you can't write to the file system but have to use the datastore instead.
So you need in your app.yaml list of handlers, something like
- url: /results.csv
script: deliver_results_file.py
- url: /screen
login: admin
script: screen.py
screen.py needs to save the results to the datastore in some convenient format. deliver_results_file.py then queries the datastore, and if the results are not already in CSV format then it converts them accordingly. It then writes the formatted data directly to the output (usually using self.response.out.write within a webapp request handler) as if it was a dynamically generated webpage.
Finally you want to schedule it to run once a night - I believe this is possible using cron jobs.
Following up on my last year's question on documentation, I now want to get started and try out Python-based Sphinx for putting together the developer documentation for a PHP CMS I've been working on.
Instead of setting up Python locally on my workstation, I would like to run it on a publicly accessible web server from the start. All the web hosting packages I have access to run on the LAMP stack, and I'm reluctant to buy Python-based hosting. I am very interested in the Google App Engine, the free quotas they provide will do for me a hundred times over, and even if not, their pricing looks very reasonable.
Now I have zero knowledge of Python - getting Sphinx to work would be my first contact with it - and very little time. As far as I understand, the platform and python libraries the App Engine provides are very compatible to a standard Python library but not identical.
So my question is:
Can Sphinx run on App Engine at all?
Is installing Sphinx on the App Engine as straightforward as if I would install it on top of a normal Python installation? Or will the App Engine's environment require tweaking of the source code that I can't perform in reasonable time with my current level of Python?
Should I be installing Sphinx on a local server and a "normal" Python stack instead first?
Does anybody know any helpful How-to's, tutorials or other resources for this?
You do not need to install Sphinx on GAE at all.
You use Sphinx to create a directory of static HTML, CSS and JS. When this step is finished, you simply upload the output from Sphinx -- in it's entirety.
The output from Sphinx (HTML, CSS and JS) is simply served from one place. You upload the documentation from where you created it to GAE as static files and serve them. Done.
There's no "install on a web server" aspect to Sphinx at all. Sphinx is not a web application; it does not run on your web server. You run it in development briefly to publish the documentation to HTML, LaTeX or whatever. Once you've created the static HTML files, you no longer need any part of Sphinx anywhere.
Can Sphinx run on App Engine at all?
I suppose it can, but you never need to.
Is installing Sphinx on the App Engine
as straightforward as...
It doesn't matter, because you don't install it there. You install it on your workstation and use it on your workstation.
Should I be installing Sphinx on a
local server and a "normal" Python
stack instead first?
Don't install it on a server. Install it on your workstation.
Does anybody know any helpful
How-to's, tutorials or other resources
for this?
If by "this" you mean "installing on a web server", then then answer is "no". One does not install it on a web server. So there are no how-to's, tutorials or resources for "installing on a web server".
If by "this" you mean "creating documentation with Sphinx", then the answer is "what's wrong with https://www.sphinx-doc.org? What do they lack?
I would like Sphinx's "engine" that
turns the input (consisting of reST
files) into HTML/CSS/JS to be
accessible from anywhere to make me
(and possible other contributors)
independent from a specific
workstation.
Sphinx is like a compiler. Everyone has their own copy on their workstation. They download the document source, make changes, commit the source changes, and upload the resulting document.
serve the generated documentation from
the same place.
Correct. After you download the source, make changes, regenerate the document and commit the changes, you upload the resulting document so it will be served from one -- and only one -- place.
Sphinx is a compiler. It is not a "web engine". It's a simple compiler that simply compiles your documentation into HTML so it can be served.
Interesting project! The main issue you're going to run into is that of filesystem access: The filesystem on App Engine is read-only, and based on looking at the source, Sphinx is fairly hard-coded to use the filesystem for output. It also expects to read the configuration file and input files from the local filesystem, which would make building docs for anything other than projects bundled with the app tricky.
It is possible to work around this, but it would require writing a simple virtual filesystem that uses the App Engine datastore, and using monkeypatching to make it work with the regular Python file interface. That's rather advanced for a "new to Python" project!
One other thing you might want to consider if you were pondering allowing users to upload projects to be documented: The Sphinx configuration file is in Python, so executing it could be dangerous - a user could do nasty things to your app with a malicious configuration file!
The difference between deployment locally via dev_appserver and remotely via appcfg has been - in my experience - limited to which of the two commands I execute. That said, I've no experience with Sphinx.
Sphinx compiles documentation, running it on a webserver makes as much sense as running gcc on a webserver.