marwan-jabbour / fall2020-workshop3

Workshop material on deploying an ML app with Flask and React

McGill AI Workshop 3

This workshop will cover the basics on:

• Creating a flask backend with a pytorch model
• Creating REST endpoints in flask for clients to call
• Create a reactjs frontend
• Having the frontend call the backend for predictions

Slides

The slides for this workshop can be found here

Backend

The backend is written in Flask and requires a Python version of 3.8+

We provide below 3 different ways of installing the needed dependencies to run the Flask app. Please run the following commands from within the backend folder

• Using pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

• Using Pipenv:

pip install pipenv
pipenv shell
pipenv install

• Using Conda:

conda env create -f environment.yml

For more info about creating and managing Conda environments, please refer to this link

Frontend

The frontend was instantiated using the following command

npm init react-app frontend

Since this has already been done here's what you need to do to run the frontend

cd frontend 
npm install
npm start