One common cause of bugs in many applications is that development and production environments differ. Although in most cases it’s not possible to provide an exact copy of the production environment for development, pursuing dev-prod parity is a worthwhile cause. Most web applications are deployed to some sort of Linux VM. If you’re using a traditional web-host, this is referred to as VPS hosting. If we want to develop in an environment similar to our production environment, how could we approach this? The closest would be to set up a second VM for development purposes. So let’s have a look t

In the last two blog posts of this series we discussed how to set up a local VM-based development environment for a cloud application, and then built a Flask-RESTful app within this environment. Today, we’ll take our app to AWS, and we’ll set up a remote development environment. The environment we’ll describe here is configured for development, not production. If you’re interested in seeing how to prepare this application for production, let me know in the comments! This blog post was written on Ubuntu; it should work as well on macOS. There are some difficulties on Windows with the SSH config

In the previous blog post in this series, I created a Vagrant VM and provisioned it with Ansible for Python development. In this part, we’ll have a look at a larger application which is configured in the same way. In this post, I’ll introduce an application that I’ll be using for more blog posts in the future, so let me know in the comments if you have any cool ideas about what can be done to make this application better. We’ll use the following: Flask Flask-RESTful PostgreSQL, and pgmigrate for migrations The Ubuntu, Vagrant, Ansible stack introduced in the blog post last we

This tutorial continues where the previous Docker-Compose tutorial left off. If you haven't read it yet, read about getting Docker-Compose and Flask running in PyCharm first. Like the first tutorial, this one was made on macOS, and although Linux should be similar there may be small differences. For details on using Docker Compose on Windows, see our blog post on using Compose on Windows. We'll continue by making a Flask version of the hottest web app from the 90s, a guest book: If you'd like to play along at home, or just have a look at the full code. You can find the code on GitHub

A couple of issues were resolved in PyCharm 2017.1, and Docker for Mac should now work out of the box. In this blog post we'll show you how to set up a project with Docker Compose on a Mac. If you're on Linux, the process is very similar. Docker Compose is supported on Windows from PyCharm 2017.2. In this tutorial we'll show how to create a very simple 'Hello World' Flask application, and then how to run it within a Docker container. For the full code, and to follow along, see GitHub: https://github.com/ErnstHaagsman/flask-compose. First things first Before we get started, let's check a c

Today's Early Access Preview build of PyCharm brings with it a major new feature: PyCharm now supports the development of Flask Web applications. We've recorded a screencast to showcase the details and invite you to watch it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaFEODzG7B8&feature=youtu.be A special thing to note is that the Flask plugin is fully open-source, and can be used as an example for developing other framework support plugins for PyCharm. You can find its source code on GitHub. In the coming days, we plan to publish additional documentation on PyCharm's OpenAPI and the internals of