Gunicorn for production serving in Flask - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Gunicorn for Production Serving with Flask

📖 Scenario: You have created a simple Flask web application for a small online store. Now, you want to serve this app in a production environment using Gunicorn, a popular WSGI server that is more robust and efficient than Flask's built-in server.

🎯 Goal: Set up a Flask app and configure Gunicorn to serve it in production mode.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a basic Flask app with one route

Define a variable for the number of Gunicorn worker processes

Write the command to run the Flask app with Gunicorn using the worker count

Add a configuration to bind Gunicorn to localhost on port 8000

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Using Gunicorn to serve Flask apps is common in real-world web deployments to handle multiple requests efficiently and reliably.

💼 Career

Understanding how to configure Gunicorn is important for backend developers and DevOps engineers working with Python web applications in production.

1

Create a basic Flask app

Create a Flask app by importing Flask from flask and instantiate it as app. Define a route / that returns the string 'Hello, Gunicorn!'.

Flask

from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)

# Define a route for '/' that returns 'Hello, Gunicorn!'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use @app.route('/') to define the route and a function that returns the greeting string.

2

Set Gunicorn worker count

Create a variable called workers and set it to 3. This will be the number of Gunicorn worker processes to handle requests.

Flask

from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def home():
    return 'Hello, Gunicorn!'

# Set the number of Gunicorn workers
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just create a variable named workers and assign it the number 3.

3

Write Gunicorn run command

Write a string variable called gunicorn_command that contains the command to run Gunicorn with the Flask app. Use the format gunicorn -w {workers} app:app where workers is the variable from step 2.

Flask

from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def home():
    return 'Hello, Gunicorn!'

workers = 3

# Create the Gunicorn command string using workers
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use an f-string to insert the workers variable into the command string.

4

Add Gunicorn bind configuration

Add bind = '127.0.0.1:8000' as a string variable to specify Gunicorn should listen on localhost port 8000.

Flask

from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def home():
    return 'Hello, Gunicorn!'

workers = 3

gunicorn_command = f'gunicorn -w {workers} app:app'

# Add bind address for Gunicorn
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Set the bind variable to the string '127.0.0.1:8000'.