while(motivation <= 0)

This weekend, we took vacuum flask multi-server.

• Redis for shared server session state
• Added health checks to the apache load balancer
• Added EFS, docker, and the required networking to the mail server.
• Fixed issue with deployment pipeline not refreshing image
• Limited main page to 8 posts and added links at the bottom to everything else so it will still get indexed.

Welp, the “new” blog is live. It’s running on python 3.12 with the latest build of flask and waitress. This version of my blog is containerized and actually uses a database. A very basic concept I know. I considered running the blog on the elastic container service and also as an elastic beanstalk app. The problem with both of those is that I don’t really need the extra capacity and I already have reserved instances purchased for use with my existing ec2 instances. I’m not sure how well flask works with multiple nodes, I may have to play around with that for resiliency sake. For now we are using apache2 as a reverse https proxy with everything hosted on my project box.

Todo items: SEO for posts, RSS for syndication and site map, fixing s3 access running from a docker container. Everything else should be working. There is also a sorting issue of the blog posts that I need to work out.

This weekend started by working on a “one time secret” clone for personal use. ChatGPT got me 80% of the way there and I spent the rest of the day tweaking and improving upon the code it wrote. Sunday I set about getting the v2 of my blog production ready by introducing waitress which is the recommended method for hosting python flask web applications and then containerizing the application so that it’s easy to stay on the latest fully supported version of python which updates frequently. Cool scripts from this past weekend:

FROM public.ecr.aws/docker/library/python:3.12

WORKDIR /tmp
# Add sample application
ADD app.py /tmp/app.py
ADD objects.py /tmp/objects.py
ADD hash.py /tmp/hash.py

COPY templates /tmp/templates
COPY static /tmp/static


COPY requirements.txt requirements.txt

RUN pip3 install -r requirements.txt

EXPOSE 8080

# Run it
CMD [ "waitress-serve", "app:app" ]

#!/bin/bash

docker build --tag vacuumflask .
imageid=$(docker image ls | grep -w "vacuumflask" | awk '{print $3}')
docker run  --env-file "/home/colin/python/blog2/vacuumflask/.env" \
--volume /home/colin/python/blog2/vacuumflask/data:/tmp/data \
-p 8080:8080 \
 "$imageid"

#!/bin/bash
destination="beanstalk/"
zipPrefix="vacuumflask-"
zipPostfix=$(date '+%Y%m%d')
zipFileName="$zipPrefix$zipPostfix.zip"
mkdir "$destination"
cp -a templates/. "$destination/templates"
cp -a static/. "$destination/static"
cp app.py "$destination"
cp Dockerfile "$destination"
cp hash.py "$destination"
cp objects.py "$destination"
cp requirements.txt "$destination"
cd "$destination"
zip -r "../$zipFileName" "."
cd ../
rm -r "$destination"
scp "$zipFileName" project:blog2
scp docker-build-run.sh project:blog2
ssh project

Next weekend I’ll need to figure out how to get it working with elastic-beanstalk and then work on feature parity.