qmorgan / insightfl

InsightFL

A basic template for building minimal web applications.

Introduction

InsightFL is a basic Flask template created specifically to help budding data scientists in the Insight Data Science program get their web applications off the ground quickly. As a former Insight fellow, I spent way too much time troubleshooting the ins and outs of web development instead of focusing on what truly mattered, extracting insight from my data.

InsightFL comes with all the necessary tools you'll need to create your web app quickly:

1. Twitter Bootstrap for designing your web pages.
2. Bower to easily install third party libraries.
3. Reveal.js for creating amazing presentations in HTML.
4. And its already in version control from the Git go!

To get started building your web app, follow the instructions below to setup your development and production environments.

Getting Started

System Requirements

1. Python(v2.7+) with pip installed.
2. node(v0.10.26+) - make sure to install the packages with npm: Windows: .msi, MacOSX: .pkg

Dev Environment Setup

1. Fork the project and clone the repository.

Note: It is helpful to change the repository name before cloning. In Github, click on Settings on the right-hand side of your screen. Within the Settings box at the top of the screen, rename the repository and click Rename.

git clone [email protected]:<username>/<project>.git

2. Change into the project directory and install node project dependencies.

cd /path/to/project/directory
npm install

3. Install virtualenv and fire up a virtual environment.

sudo pip install virtualenv
virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate

4. Install Python project dependencies.

pip install -r requirements.txt

5. To test your application, run the server.py file: python server.py, and open your web browser to localhost:5000.

That's it! You are ready to start coding your project.

Deploying to AWS

Note: the setup script assumes you are deploying to an Ubuntu 14.04 Server

1. Secure copy the setup script (located in the deployment directory) to the remote host.

scp -i mykey.pem /path/to/setup.sh [email protected]:~

where mykey.pem is your downloaded key pair from Amazon and @ec2-12-345-67-89.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com is your Amazon EC2 Public DNS.

2. SSH into the remote host and run the setup script. Answer the questions when prompted and wait for the downloads to finish.

ssh -i mykey.pem [email protected]
source setup.sh

3. Open up a web browser and enter your public DNS: ec2-12-345-67-89.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com

That's it, you should now have a fully functioning web app!