Deployment

There are several deployment strategies for the Integration Bridge application.

1. Self-hosted. Build from the repository and host in a datacenter at your institution.

2. Vendor-hosted. Bundle with a solution and give institutional admins access for configuration.

3. Cloud-hosted and managed by the developer. Hosted and customized for your needs. Depending on use-case, cost would be fair. For example, hosting an instance on Google Cloud has resulted in pennies a month due to the low network and storage utilization.

In all cases, customizations of the integration bridge may be required. More is covered in the Customization section of this doc.

Recommended deployment (Docker)

Development Server

1. Clone the repo from: https://github.com/eharvey71/edtech-platform-integration-bridge

2. From the command line, change to the root of the cloned repo. Edit the Dockerfile and ensure proper config for local dev. Depending on your environment, it should look something like the following:

Dockerfile

# Use an official Python runtime as a parent image
FROM python:3.8-slim

# Set the working directory in the container
WORKDIR /usr/src/app

# Copy the current directory contents into the container at /usr/src/app
COPY . .

# Install any needed packages specified in requirements.txt
RUN pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt

# Generate a random secret key and store it in an environment variable
RUN echo "FLASK_SECRET_KEY=$(openssl rand -base64 32)" > .env

# Generate a random key for JWT Auth
RUN echo "JWT_SECRET=$(openssl rand -base64 32)" >> .env

# Flask Debug off
RUN echo "DEBUG=False" >> .env

# Build the starter sample database
RUN python build_database.py

# Make port 80 available to the world outside this container
EXPOSE 80

# Use Uvicorn to run the application, replace `app:app` with your application and variable
CMD ["uvicorn", "app:app", "--host", "0.0.0.0", "--port", "80"]

3. From the root directory of the repo, build the image and launch a container (or use Docker desktop to perfom the run action)

docker build . -t integration-bridge-test
docker run -p 4000:80 integration-bridge-test

4. Connect to http://localhost:4000/

Production Server

The following examples don’t take into account the necessary optimization that may be required to deploy the Integation Bridge within certain cloud environments. Please use them as a guide to get things started on certain target platforms.

The build_prod_db.py script isn’t included in the repository, but you can create your own by using the prod_test_db.py as a template.

Containerized App on Google Cloud Run - Example

Important

In this example, it is important to note that configuration changes made within the app will not persist while using the default configuration, since SQLite and a static, local log files are used.

Configuration updates and logging will appear to work fine, initially, but will likely disappear due to the nature of local storage on GCloud Run. If you don’t intend to make changes beyond a single initial configuration, you’ll want to make your changes in the build_prod_db.py, which will create the initial database during deployment with all of your desired configuration and apptokens. Logging, however, will not persist. In this case, you will want to automate a periodic pull of logs via the logs endpoint in order to retain udpates.

If GCloud Run is preferred for deployment, Google offers many storage options that you’ll want to explore.

This is just one method for deploying to Google Cloud Run. Using the UI provided by Google for deployment works fine but may be confusing, so this assumes knowlege of the Google CLI. This is a simplified version to help get you started. Please refer to Google’s documentation for configuring your serverless instance and setting up your monitoring dashboard.

1. Install the Google Cloud CLI for your OS

2. Clone the repo from: https://github.com/eharvey71/edtech-platform-integration-bridge

3. From the command line, change to the root of the cloned repo. Edit the Dockerfile for “production”

Dockerfile

# Use an official Python runtime as a parent image
FROM python:3.8-slim

# Set the working directory in the container
WORKDIR /usr/src/app

# Copy the current directory contents into the container at /usr/src/app
COPY . .

# Install any needed packages specified in requirements.txt
RUN pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements-prod.txt

# Generate a random secret key and store it in an environment variable
RUN echo "FLASK_SECRET_KEY=$(openssl rand -base64 32)" > .env

# Generate a random key for JWT Auth
RUN echo "JWT_SECRET=$(openssl rand -base64 32)" >> .env

# Flask Debug off
RUN echo "DEBUG=False" >> .env

# Build the production database
RUN python build_prod_db.py

# Production uses gunicorn
CMD exec gunicorn --bind :$PORT --workers 1 --worker-class uvicorn.workers.UvicornWorker  --threads 8 app:app

4. From your current cloned project directory, you may need to initialize and get your project id before completing the next steps

gcloud init
gcloud config get-value project

5. Set your region. This example assumes us-east-5

gcloud config set run/region us-east5

6. Build the new container image using the gcloud CLI and record the resulting container URL for the next step

gcloud builds submit --tag gcr.io/{YOUR-PROJECT-ID}/integration-bridge

7. Launch the new containerized deployment from the glcoud container registry

gcloud run deploy integration-bridge --image {CONTAINER-URL} --platform managed

Step-by-Step Full Deployment

The integration bridge is built using the following frameworks and libaries:

• Connexion 3 Python web framework (with Flask, Uvicorn, Swagger-UI extras)

• Bootstrap 5

• SQL Alchemy ORM

• Additional Swagger-UI Bundle (when additional customization is required)

More to come …