Flask Manage Dev Live Databases on Elastic Beanstalk

Question

I have a Flask app that I have deployed to AWS Elastic Beanstalk and all works well. However I currently have the SQLAlchemy connection string hard-coded as the live AWS string. I need now to set thing up so that the AWS server automatically picks up the correct string, and my local environment uses the dev (local string). I have been reading the following post on how to achieve this:

Flask: How to manage different environment databases?

This makes sense in theory but I can't find any practical examples of how to actually achieve this on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. My init.py code looks like this:

from flask import Flask
from flask_debugtoolbar import DebugToolbarExtension
from flask_cors import CORS, cross_origin
from flask_sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemy

application = app = Flask(__name__)

app.config.from_object('config')
app.config.from_envvar('XXXXXPRODUCTION_CONFIG',silent=True)
db = SQLAlchemy(app)
CORS(app)

Config.py looks like this:

SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = 'mysql://root:xxxxxxx@localhost/xxxxx'
SQLALCHEMY_TRACK_MODIFICATIONS = False
DEBUG = True

And Config_production_dev.py looks like this:

SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = 'mysql://xxxxxx:xxxxxx@#########.cuhrbowyd8hk.eu-west-2.rds.amazonaws.com/ebdb'
SQLALCHEMY_TRACK_MODIFICATIONS = False
DEBUG = False

So everything is set up but I now have no idea how to initiate this part for the AWS instance:

app.config.from_envvar('XXXXXPRODUCTION_CONFIG',silent=True)

According to the post mentioned above I need something like this:

environment=XXXXXPRODUCTION_CONFIG="/home/tigra/mycoolapp/settings_production.py"

But is the path shown a path on my local machine? Or a path to my Elastic Beanstalk app? And if so how do I find the details of this path? Also how do I load this command up into the EB environment so that it executes? I can't find this information anywhere. Any help would be much appreciated.

I'm deploying the app using eb deploy in eb cli.

Answer 1

I worked out the final step so please see below if you're stuck with the same. Elastic Beanstalk Environment Variables are the answer. In my case I needed to run the following command in eb cli:

eb setenv XXXXXPRODUCTION_CONFIG=/opt/python/current/app/config_production_dev.py

The path is to the config_production_dev.py file in my app folder on the Elastic Beanstalk server and I found it by navigating using SSH.

It's also possible to set Environment Variables via your browser here:

Login to AWS Then

services > elastic beanstalk > "your-env" > configuration > software configuration

Then scroll down to "Environment Properties". In my case:

Property Name : XXXXXPRODUCTION_CONFIG

Property Value : /opt/python/current/app/config_production_dev.py