Hello World for Bottle

In this tutorial, we'll create a web app and deploy it to Heroku, using Bottle.

tl;dr

Want to jump right in? You can quickly get a copy of this app in your Heroku account at python.heroku.com.

Ready?

Before we start, you need a Heroku account and toolbelt.

Act I: Build.

1. Make sure you're using a virtualenv:

   $ virtualenv --no-site-packages venv
   $ source venv/bin/activate
   

2. Install your dependencies:

   $ pip install bottle
   

3. Say Hello to the World in app.py:

   import os
   from bottle import route, run
   
   @route('/hello/:name')
   def index(name='World'):
       return '<b>Hello %s!</b>' % name
   

Simple enough.

Now, we need to serve our app locally. On Heroku, your application's port is available as an environment variable.

So, we can grab the port we need to run it on Heroku, and default when that's not defined (locally):

# Get required port, default to 5000.
port = os.environ.get('PORT', 5000)

And, we can bind to the port:

# Run the app.
run(host='0.0.0.0', port=port)

Act II: Try.

Let's run the app locally:

$ python app.py
Bottle server starting up (using WSGIRefServer())...
Listening on http://0.0.0.0:5000/
Hit Ctrl-C to quit.

Now you can hit the app and play around with it:

$ curl http://0.0.0.0:5000/hello/kitty
<b>Hello kitty!</b>

Act III: Deploy.

In the project directory, create a new file named Procfile. This specifies the processes that comprise your app.

Our Procfile will look like this:

web: python app.py

You can now test this out locally with the foreman command (included in the toolbelt):

$ foreman start
18:04:25 web.1     | started with pid 21350
18:04:25 web.1     | Bottle server starting up (using WSGIRefServer())...
18:04:25 web.1     | Listening on http://0.0.0.0:5000/
18:04:25 web.1     | Hit Ctrl-C to quit.

It works! Let's push this app up to Heroku.

We also need to tell Heroku what our app needs to run.:

$ pip freeze > requirements.txt

Your app needs to be in a Git repo. If it isn't already, you can do this easily:

$ git init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Created app."

Now, we can create a new heroku app to push this to:

$ heroku create --stack cedar
Creating simple-warrior-3414... done, stack is cedar
http://simple-warrior-3414.herokuapp.com/ | git@heroku.com:simple-warrior-3414.git
Git remote heroku added

Let's push it up!

$ git push heroku master
...
$ curl http://simple-warrior-3414.herokuapp.com/hello/kitty
<b>Hello kitty!</b>

\o/