Ravi Kumawat | AI Engineer & Data Scientist

Deploying a Flask application properly is crucial for ensuring your web application runs efficiently and securely in a production environment. This guide will walk you through the process of deploying a Flask application on AWS EC2 using Gunicorn as the WSGI server and Nginx as the reverse proxy.

Prerequisites

An AWS account

Basic knowledge of command line and SSH

A Flask application ready for deployment

Understanding of Python virtual environments

1. Launch an EC2 Instance

First, we'll need to set up our EC2 instance:

Click "Launch Instance" & Choose Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS (or newer)

Select t2.micro (free tier eligible)

Configure security group to allow HTTP (80), HTTPS (443), and SSH (22)

2. Connect to Your Instance

bash

ssh -i /path/to/your-key.pem ubuntu@your-public-ip

3. Install Required Packages

bash

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install python3 python3-pip python3-venv nginx git -y

4. Set Up Your Application

Clone your application repository and set up a virtual environment:

bash

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/your-repo.git
cd your-repo
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install gunicorn

5. Configure Gunicorn

Create a systemd service file: `sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/myflaskapp.service`

ini

[Unit]
Description=Gunicorn instance for myflaskapp
After=network.target

[Service]
User=ubuntu
Group=www-data
WorkingDirectory=/home/ubuntu/your-repo
Environment="PATH=/home/ubuntu/your-repo/.venv/bin"
ExecStart=/home/ubuntu/your-repo/.venv/bin/gunicorn --workers 3 --bind unix:myflaskapp.sock -m 007 app:app

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

6. Configure Nginx

Create configuration: `sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/myflaskapp`

nginx

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name your-public-ip;

  location / {
    proxy_pass http://unix:/home/ubuntu/your-repo/myflaskapp.sock;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  }
}

7. Conclusion

Your Flask application is now running on EC2 with Gunicorn and Nginx! Don't forget to set up HTTPS next.