No Docker needed. Just a simplest setup you can get to launching and getting your dopamine hit.

pancy

·

Follow

4 min read

·

Dec 30, 2020

101

1

Listen

Share

I have come to grown very wary of all the extra layers of technologies (I’m looking at you, Docker) that had compounded onto launching a piece of software on the web. Many will frown upon you if you don’t containerize your app in 2021, but the truth is for most use cases, containers are just a waste of time and headspace compared to just doing it the old-school way.

Here I’m going to walk you through setting up a running HTTPS API server in Python using FastAPI (trust me, Flask is so 2008) and Caddy web server (this one is a total replacement to NGINX and gives you automatic HTTPS, saving you from the pain of setting up TLS certificate).

🤷 Tips: Hold it if you are tempted to Dockerize your app for your first Product Hunt launch or Hacker News show and tell. You’re distracted.

Setting Up

1. Launch a t2.micro EC2 instance on AWS. I’ll be using Amazon Linux 2 in this example, but you can stick to Ubuntu if you like.
2. Download a .pem keyfile from the instance in order to SSH into it.
3. In the instance security group, edit the in-bound rule to open port 80 and 443 to public like this:

4. SSH into the instance with:

ssh -i my-key.pem ec2-user@<your-instance-public-dns-name>

💁‍♀️ Your EC2 instance public DNS name usually ends with .compute.amazonaws.com . Note that ec2-user is currently a default user name for AWS Amazon Linux 2 instance.

5. Install Caddy web server with

yum install yum-plugin-copr
yum copr enable @caddy/caddy
yum install caddy

This installation might run Caddy server process in the background right away. To be sure, run caddy stop .

6. Optionally, you may need to grant low-numbered port access to non-root binary, which is caddy in this case. This allows Caddy web server to…