12/29/23, 2:36 AM Free Hosting a Python API.
Hosting a Python Django Backend REST… | by Trần Hoàng Long | Medium
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Free Hosting a Python API
Trần Hoàng Long · Follow
4 min read · Jan 30
62 1
My choice for free python hosting 🎖
Foreword
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12/29/23, 2:36 AM Free Hosting a Python API. Hosting a Python Django Backend REST… | by Trần Hoàng Long | Medium
A few months ago, I encountered a problem while trying to deploy my
backend API for a demo of my side project. Which free service would host
my python backend?
The criterias/downsides that I had were:
Must be fully free with no credit card requirement (student problem 😭)
→ So no AWS, Google or Azure or any other virtual machine services
I have a database so the server must be able to make DB connections
instead of just communicating with frontend
Of course speed is not my concern since we’re going dirt-tier anyways
Lastly, of course, the server must support python (duh!) (Django to be
specific)
If you had some of the similar problems, this blog could be for you. I’ll
discuss some of my findings and workarounds below
😓 It was suprisingly hard for me to find a completely free python hosting
service. Took lots of trial/error. That’s why I write this post for anyone that
likes to save their time digging.
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12/29/23, 2:36 AM Free Hosting a Python API. Hosting a Python Django Backend REST… | by Trần Hoàng Long | Medium
TOC
· Foreword
· TOC
· Project Description
∘ Database
∘ Backend
∘ Frontend
· Hosting Service
· Render Hosting
∘ Build server
∘ Environment Variables
∘ Run server
· Demo
· Final words
Project Description
So here’s a quick layout of my project at the time, called Geo-covid , which is
basically a visualization website for the covid problem in USA, which
consists of 3 parts
Database
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12/29/23, 2:36 AM Free Hosting a Python API. Hosting a Python Django Backend REST… | by Trần Hoàng Long | Medium
MongoDB is my goto database here due to the implementation simplicity and
also the Mongo Atlas support for free DB hosting
‼️ This (db connection from/to the backend) proven itself to be the trickiest
part of the server hosting process
Backend
My API implemented with Python and Django REST API
Why Django REST and not Fast API? Well cause I just wanna try Django out
for once.
Frontend
Web visualization with the help of Tailwind CSS and D3.js (graph) and
Leaflet (map)
We don’t focus on the frontend here since free hosting for frontend JS is
everywhere and it only make simple request back/forth to our API server.
Hosting Service
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12/29/23, 2:36 AM Free Hosting a Python API. Hosting a Python Django Backend REST… | by Trần Hoàng Long | Medium
After some trial and error, the two contenders that were the most promising
were:
1. render.com
2. pythonanywhere.com
But in the end, pythonanywhere fell short of my need, despite being the more
comprehensive and dev friendly service. All because of the previously
mention DB connection problem 😮💨
You see on the free tier, pythonanywhere only allow external connection
under the https protocol, so my Mongo Atlas connection is of mongodb://
protocol which would simply not work (Link)
Thankfully, render later prove to work properly, which is good enough 🙏
Render Hosting
The hosting procedure is very detaily describe on Render 's documentation
(Django Quickstart Doc). So I’m just going to point out notable things from
my project
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12/29/23, 2:36 AM Free Hosting a Python API. Hosting a Python Django Backend REST… | by Trần Hoàng Long | Medium
The source code for my backend that’s deployed could be found on my
production branch. And in that branch, I din’t modify any code or add files
to config deployment. All were done on Render itself (due to the simplicity of
my project)
Important steps are:
1. Build: Setup python environment and (optional) build static files
2. Setup production environment variables
3. Run server
Build server
Python env
All we need here is a requirement.txt file that we’lll use to install packages
when building our source code with pip install -r requirement.txt
Static files
Static files for Django server API GUI could be generated with python
manage.py collectstatic
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12/29/23, 2:36 AM Free Hosting a Python API. Hosting a Python Django Backend REST… | by Trần Hoàng Long | Medium
Build
We put all the needed commands for server preping in the Build Command
option for Render (found in Settings > Build & Deploy > Build Command ). I set
it as
pip install -r requirements.txt && python manage.py collectstatic
Environment Variables
Found in Environment tab
First option to set is the PYTHON_VERSION (I used 3.9.0 )
For other variables related to my backend, I uploaded my .env file directly
to Render instead.
This includes:
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12/29/23, 2:36 AM Free Hosting a Python API. Hosting a Python Django Backend REST… | by Trần Hoàng Long | Medium
DEBUG=FALSE
DB_URL="mongodb+srv://<username>:<password>@<cluster_address>.mongodb.net/?retry
DEPLOY_ENV=production
Here’s how the environment settings looks like
Render’s Project Environment Settings
❓For anyone wondering how in the code I connected to Atlas , here’s that
snippet
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12/29/23, 2:36 AM Free Hosting a Python API. Hosting a Python Django Backend REST… | by Trần Hoàng Long | Medium
from pymongo import MongoClient
client = MongoClient(
host=DB_URL
)
# Example DB URL:
# "mongodb+srv://username:
[email protected]/?retryWrites=true&
Run server
Search Settings > Build & Deploy > Run Command Write
gunicorn --bind :$PORT --workers 4 -k uvicorn.workers.UvicornWorker geo_covid.as
Key takeaway is that I ran it with gunicorn and some extra port, worker
settings.
After all the settings, just run deploy with latest commit 🤲
Demo
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12/29/23, 2:36 AM Free Hosting a Python API. Hosting a Python Django Backend REST… | by Trần Hoàng Long | Medium
After getting the DB up and then the backend API online, I try making
connections to it from my frontend and everything is nice/clean 👩🍳🥳
The server might not be online anymore but as of now, my frontend is still
online and you can visit it at https://geo-covid-frontend.web.app/
Demo
Backend source code can be found here and front-end here
Final words
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12/29/23, 2:36 AM Free Hosting a Python API. Hosting a Python Django Backend REST… | by Trần Hoàng Long | Medium
Those are my findings while tring to get my side project online. It’s quite
messy and erroneous overall but I’m quite happy that it’s online.
I’ll try to get a creditcard soon ☠️
But please, do comment your thought on my topic and clap if it helped in any
ways. Would love to hear from you ⭐
Thanks for reading and have a nice day 😎
Deployment Python Render Rest Api Production
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12/29/23, 2:36 AM Free Hosting a Python API. Hosting a Python Django Backend REST… | by Trần Hoàng Long | Medium
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