[FIXED] How to Host a Flask website from localhost 5000

Issue

Hello I coded this website that generates math problems (Here is the code: Here)

It is coded on flask and it is locally being hosted on this link that is not accessible to other people http://127.0.0.1:5000/ .I have a google domain and I want to have a website. What things / services do I need to use. I have been wait to see if I need to use AWS but I think I might need to. I have tried things like transferring it off of flask but I can't. If this is a repost sorry please post there answer thanks -Ben

Solution

I am assuming what you're asking is to host your flask web site so others can view it. The address you mention in your post is the local host address for your computer and is only accessible from your own computer. If you only want someone on your same network (WiFi) to access it, you would need to replace "127.0.0.1" with the IP address of your computer. You would also likely have to open up a firewall on your computer to allow the port 5000.

However, if you want anyone on the internet to access your site, there are a ton of ways to do this but since you mentioned AWS, you can do this easily by running a small EC2 instance (virtual server). If you have a new AWS account and have not already run any EC2 in that account, you can actually run a small EC2 instance for free for a whole year. Great for small projects. If you're just getting started with EC2, you may want to go here https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/getting-started/

Basic steps:

1. Spin up an EC2 instance. Choose the default Amazon Linxu 2 OS type, make sure to create/assign a key pair so you can later ssh into it, make sure the Allow SSH from anywhere setting is checked/selected and the Allow HTTP checkbox is checked (not HTTPS).
2. Wait for the instance to launch.
3. Log into your instance by clicking on your ec2 instance in the list of ec2 instnaces and click the Connect button, click the Connect button again (Instance connect tab). If that doesn't work, follow the steps on the SSH client tab.
4. Install flask

pip3 install flask

5. Clone your git repo

git clone https://github.com/some0ne14/Math-Ibex.git

6. Change to your repos' folder

cd Math-Ibex/Math-Practice-Website-master

7. Edit your main.py so that the app.run line looks like the following (you can do this on GitHub before you run git clone actually or use the nano command to edit the file easily). This allows the system to run on the standard web port 80.

app.run(host='0.0.0.0', port=80, debug=True)

8. Run the following to start the application. If you want to run it as a service so you can walk away or close the terminal and it will still stay running, just search on here how to run flask as a service.

python3 main.py

9. You can now connect to your server with any web browser using your EC2 instance's public IP address or generated AWS DNS name (available on the EC2 instnace property page).
10. Make sure to stop your instance when not using it to save those free runtime minutes.

Answered By - JoeW