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Production Deployment Checklist

To prepare the application for a production environment, you must use the ProductionConfig class, which enforces strict security requirements and optimizes performance settings for high-traffic scenarios.

Initialize the Application for Production​

To deploy the application, create a WSGI entry point (e.g., wsgi.py) that passes the ProductionConfig class to the create_app factory. This overrides the default DevelopmentConfig.

# wsgi.py
from app import create_app
from app.config import ProductionConfig

# Initialize the app with production settings
app = create_app(config_class=ProductionConfig)

Configure Required Environment Variables​

The ProductionConfig class in app/config.py requires the SECRET_KEY environment variable to be set. Unlike the base configuration, it does not provide a default value and will raise an error if it is missing.

# Set the mandatory secret key
export SECRET_KEY="your-highly-secure-random-string"

# Optional: Override default page size (defaults to 25)
export PAGE_SIZE=50

Performance and Caching​

When using ProductionConfig, the application automatically scales its internal cache to handle production loads. You can verify these settings by calling get_cache_config() on the configuration instance.

  • TTL (Time to Live): Increased to 600 seconds (10 minutes).
  • Max Entries: Increased to 4096 entries.
  • Eviction Policy: Uses Least Recently Used (LRU).
from app.config import ProductionConfig

config = ProductionConfig()
cache_settings = config.get_cache_config()
# Returns: {"ttl_seconds": 600, "max_entries": 4096, "eviction": "lru"}

Configure Health and Readiness Probes​

The application provides internal diagnostic endpoints mounted under the /_internal prefix in app/routes/_health.py. These should be used by your load balancer or orchestrator (like Kubernetes) to monitor the service.

  • Liveness Probe (GET /_internal/health): Returns 200 OK if the process is running.
  • Readiness Probe (GET /_internal/ready): Verifies that the BookmarkService is initialized and can perform database operations.

Example Nginx/Load Balancer configuration:

# Restrict access to internal endpoints
location /_internal {
    allow 10.0.0.0/8; # Only allow internal network
    deny all;
    proxy_pass http://app_server;
}

Troubleshooting​

Missing SECRET_KEY​

If you attempt to start the application in production without setting the SECRET_KEY environment variable, the application will fail to start with a KeyError:

File "app/config.py", line 62, in ProductionConfig
    SECRET_KEY: str = field(default_factory=lambda: os.environ["SECRET_KEY"])
  File "app/config.py", line 62, in <lambda>
    SECRET_KEY: str = field(default_factory=lambda: os.environ["SECRET_KEY"])
  File ".../os.py", line 679, in __getitem__
    raise KeyError(key) from None
KeyError: 'SECRET_KEY'

Solution: Ensure SECRET_KEY is exported in your shell or defined in your container's environment variables.

Debug Mode is Enabled​

If you see "Debug mode: on" in your logs, you have likely initialized the app without arguments, causing it to fall back to DevelopmentConfig defined in app/__init__.py:

# INCORRECT for production
app = create_app() 

# CORRECT for production
app = create_app(config_class=ProductionConfig)