Flask and Angular on Heroku

I am working my way through this excellent tutorial, covering Python3, Flask, Angular, Heroku, SQLAlchemy, Alembic, requests, Beautiful Soup, NLTK, Redis and D3. Here are some extra notes

• To stop me from blindly copying/pasting the code, I printed off the tutorial and worked from the paper version.
• I had some problems installing Virtualenvwrapper (on Linux Mint 17.2), until I followed these instructions
• I had some clashes with Anaconda
  • Virtualenvwrapper’s deactivate clashed with Anaconda’s deactivate. Prompted by these instructions I renamed ~/anaconda/bin/activate and ~/anaconda/bin/deactivate
  • “pip install psycopg2” resulted in:
    Error: “setuptools must be installed to install from a source distribution”
    After much experimentation I guessed that this might be due to Anaconda. I created a new virtual machine (without Anaconda) and re-started the tutorial. This fixed the psycopg2 problem

Part 1, set up Heroku

• I used a free Heroku account. Between a dedicated server, a WebFaction account and a HotDrupal account I’m already paying enough for hosting
• “heroku create wordcounts-pro” gave me an error “Name is already taken”. According to this Heroku page,  app names are in the global namespace, so I guess I’m not the first one to follow this tutorial. To work around this, I prepended the app name with my initials, i.e. “heroku create cdg-wordcounts-pro”, etc
• So I can push the changes to heroku I set up public key access
• Before running “git push stage/pro master”, make sure to check in the changes to git (git add, git commit)

Part 2, set up databases

• To create the Postgres database:
  • sudo su — postgres
  • psql
    • # CREATE DATABASE wordcount_dev;
    • # CREATE USER ‘<your user name>’
    • # GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordcount_dev TO <your user name>;
• After running “heroku run python manage.py db upgrade …” I got the error message:
  No such file or directory: ‘/app/migrations/versions’
  • Locally I had an empty directory <app folder>/migrations/versions. However, git ignores empty directories. This is why I could run “.. manage.py db upgrade” locally but not on heroku
  • Oops, I’d forgotten to run
    python manage.py db migrate
    Now it worked fine
  • If you make the same mistake, remember to propagate the changes to heroku and then re-run db migrate on heroku

Part 3, requests, Beautiful Soup and NLTK

• At one stage I got a server error. To sort this I looked at the heroku log:
  heroku logs –app <heroku app name>
• When I ran the nltk downloader I didn’t get the usual gui but a “tui” (text user interface). It was fairly simple to navigate, but I didn’t bother to specify the location of the tokenizers. Instead I used the default (~/nltk_data) and then moved nltk_data into my app folder
• The links to Bootstrap and jQuery didn’t work, either because I mistyped them or because they are out of date. The Bootstrap and jQuery websites give you up-to-date CDN links, so use those instead

Part 4, Redis task queue

• I used these instructions to install Redis on Linux Mint
• Apart from the inevitable few typing mistakes, everything worked remarkably smoothly. Nothing else to add

Part 5, Adding in Angular

• It all went well, until I added the getWordCount function to the controller. I’d put the function inside the main.js file, but outside of the controller. When poller got called, none of the dependencies were included, so it couldn’t find $http (first line of poller function)
  • The error was: $http not defined
  • Despite comparing my version with the author’s GitHub one, I couldn’t see the difference. In the end I used the author’s version (of main.js) instead of mine. That worked fine. It took another line by line comparison to find the problem
• The word/frequency list is no longer sorted. jsonify loses the order

Part 6, Staging the changes, including Redis

• So far I’ve been using a free account. When I tried to add on Redis, heroku tells me: Please verify your account to install this add-on plan (please enter a credit card)
  • If I understand it correctly, it is still free (but don’t take my word for it – and don’t come back to me if you end up getting charged)
  • I entered my credit card details for my Heroku again. Now I can add Redis
• “heroku addons:add redistogo –app” gave a warning to say that “addons:add” has been deprecated.
  • I used “addons:create” instead