Version 1.0

Overview

This package is a required project of the "Full Stack Web Developer" nanodegree at Udacity. The main objectives of this practice include configuring a linux server and deploying a web application, 'Item Catalog', on the server so that it is accessible via an IP address over the internet.

Result

i. The IP address: http://52.20.17.17 and SSH port: 2200. ii. The complete URL to the web application: http://52.20.17.17. iii. A summary of software installed and configuration changes made:

The server was setup at Amazon Lightsail at the $5 tier (512MB RAM, 20GB).
sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get upgrade, and sudo apt-get autoremove were used to keep linux packages current.
sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config was used to change the ssh port to 2200 the port was also allowed in the Lightsail console (I was working on this project at different locations and some of them only allow 2222 port in their wifi service. So I opened that port as well)
sudo ufw default deny incoming, sudo ufw default allow outgoing, sudo ufw allow xxx and sudo ufw enable were used to configure the firewall to only listen to SSH(port 2200 and 2222), HTTP(port 80), and NTP(port 123)
sudo adduser grader was used to adde 'grader' user (there is a password for 'grader'); sudo usermod -aG sudo grader was used to give 'grader' superuser permission.
A key pair was generated using ssh-keygen (the privated key is provide with the submission, it has a passcode 'aaaaaa') The system was configured to only allow key based login by default.
sudo apt-get install apache2 --install Apache2
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-wsgi python-dev --install Python mod-wsgi
sudo apt-get install python --install python
sudo a2enmod wsgi --enable wsgi
built the /var/www/ItemCat/ItemCat working directory following this guide: How to deploy a Flask application on an Ubuntu (I still do not quite understand what is the venv is for the later project, seems I have never needed after this step); after sudo service apache2 restart my web site shows the "Hello, I love Digital Ocean!" message
cloned over my ItemCat project from GitHub
sudo pip install xxx necessary packages (see package list below)
replace the __init__.py with my main app. A couple of fine tweaks: a) the original project used sqlite and this one use postgresql, so the engine = create_engine('sqlite:///itemcat.db') line was changed to engine = create_engine(‘postgresql://catalog:catalog@localhost:5432/itemcat’) in all three .py files; b) .json files were pointed to via absolute path, e.g. /var/www/ItemCat/ItemCat/xxx.json; c) IP address was added to both Google and Facebook developer console as redirect address. It was also added to the client_secret.json file; d) Flask was downgraded to 0.9 to bring Google login back to function. iv. A list of third-party resources made use of to complete this project: certifi==2017.7.27.1 chardet==3.0.4 click==6.7 Flask==0.9 Flask-SQLAlchemy==2.2 httplib2==0.10.3 idna==2.5 itsdangerous==0.24 Jinja2==2.9.6 MarkupSafe==1.0 oauth2client==4.1.2 psycopg2==2.7.3 pyasn1==0.3.1 pyasn1-modules==0.0.10 requests==2.18.2 rsa==3.4.2 six==1.10.0 SQLAlchemy==1.1.12 urllib3==1.22 virtualenv==15.1.0 Werkzeug==0.12.2

Functions

The functions of the ItemCat app can be found in the original GitHub repo README

How to use

Open the app in a browser at http://52.20.17.17.

License

MIT