Production: Gunicorn, Nginx and Docker

A release checklist: workers, reverse proxy, env vars and health checks.

• Advanced
• 16 min read
• 3 objectives

Before this lessonLesson 14: Migrations and Schema Changes

The development server is single-process and not hardened. Production is gunicorn, a reverse proxy, and config from the environment.

Gunicorn

gunicorn -w 4 -b 0.0.0.0:8000 --access-logfile - --timeout 30 wsgi:app

# wsgi.py
from myapp import create_app
from myapp.config import ProdConfig
app = create_app(ProdConfig)

Docker

FROM python:3.12-slim
WORKDIR /app
COPY requirements.txt .
RUN pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt
COPY . .
ENV FLASK_CONFIG=myapp.config.ProdConfig
CMD ["gunicorn", "-w", "2", "-b", "0.0.0.0:8000", "wsgi:app"]

Release checklist

• DEBUG false, strong SECRET_KEY from the environment.
• HTTPS at the proxy; PREFERRED_URL_SCHEME = "https" and ProxyFix if you are behind one.
• Migrate on release, then start workers.
• /health that checks the database for the load balancer.

# Write your solution here