Linode

Plan

Introduction to Linode
Create a Virtual Private Server (VPS) on Linode.
Set up Nginx web server on droplet.
Static web pages.
Some linux commands.
Set up Python on the machine.
Close the VPS.

What is Linode?

Linode now part of Akamai
Cloud
Status

Register on Linode

Create Linode

Region - does not really matter for us.
OS: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Shared CPU Nanode 1Gb - costs $5/month or $0.0075 / hour. 1Gb RAM 25 GB storage.

LISH console

User root
Look around the disk
ls
pwd
uptime
df -h
top
htop
I use vim to edit files, but if you are not familiar with it then we should start with something closer to what you might be familiar with.
Use nano to edit files.

SSH from Windows

Create ssh keypair

Generate ssh keypair by running git-keygen and accepting all the defaults.

ssh-keygen

ls -l ~/.ssh

Install nginx

Visit: http://IP (replace the IP with the real IP of your machine)
The browser will report that it cannot find the site
Between the command check the used disk size using df -h to see how much disk space is used by the Operating System and the packages.

apt update
apt upgrade
apt install nginx
reboot

Visit: http://IP again (make sure it uses http and not https)
This file /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default is the configuration file of Nginx.
Edit /var/www/html/index.nginx-debian.html and see the changes are reflected on the web page.
Visit http://IP/hello.html and observe that the server returns a 404 page.
Create the file /var/www/html/404.html
Edit the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default file, add error_page 404 /404.html;
Reload the web server: systemctl reload nginx
Visit http://IP/hello.html again and observe that the server returns our own 404 page.
Create the file, /var/www/html/hello.html and see that it can be loaded via the browser.

Install Python

Python3 is already installed, so we only need virtualenv

apt install virtualenv

TODO: Convert the project to use uv and then Install uv

Create user

adduser --gecos '' --disabled-password  dev

Add the application source code

Switch to the user:

su - dev

By cloning:

git clone https://github.com/szabgab/python-flask-demo.git
cd python-flask-demo
virtualenv venv

By upload using scp, run the command on your desktop:

scp -r . root@IP:

This is just an example, you need to zip the files on your computer, scp the zip file and unzip in user dev.

Install the Python dependencies

source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Try the development flask server

flask run --port 5000 --host 0.0.0.0

Access http://IP:5000/

Install and configure uwsgi

apt install uwsgi
apt install uwsgi-plugin-python3
ln -s /home/dev/python-flask-demo/config/demo-uwsgi.ini /etc/uwsgi/apps-enabled/demo-uwsgi.ini
service uwsgi restart

If there is a problem you might find help by looking at the log file:

/var/log/uwsgi/app/demo-uwsgi.log

I got the following error "Fatal Python error: init_fs_encoding: failed to get the Python codec of the filesystem encoding"

I had make the home directory of the dev user to be world readable, that solved the problem:

chmod +r /home/dev/

Configure nginx

As user root:

ls -l /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
ln -s /home/dev/python-flask-demo/config/demo-nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/demo-nginx.conf

Reload the nginx configuration

systemctl reload nginx

If there are problems look at

/var/log/nginx/python-flask-demo.error.log

Linode services

Add external disk
Add s3 buckets
Upgrade the server to more memory and CPU

Keyboard shortcuts

Linode