With weegee.ch I run a handful crawlers. At the beginning I didn’t have problems with crawling protection but over time my little project got more successful (I’m on the first page of Google for the relevant search queries since a few weeks) so I see more and more websites blocking me.

I went for Brightdata as they offer a good “pay as you use” model which works well for smaller sites like mine (and don’t require to pay a minimal price per month).

I couldn’t find a documentation which covers the whole install process, that’s why I’m writing this post.

During the past few months I’ve been busy creating my first side project. This week, I’ve reached a milestone - both Web and mobile apps are now available, may I present to you:

weegee.ch - the biggest shared flat search in Switzerland. In Switzerland, shared flats are called WGs (for WohnGemeinschaft), pronounced “weegee”, that’s where the domain name comes from.

It’s available for web, iOS and android.

Mapbox for flutter is still not documented well enough. I’ve spent almost a day until I had something working. With this blog post I hope to help the next ones, so that they don’t need so much time setting it up.

Matomo is a replacement for google analytics which is free when you self-host it. Honestly, I underestimated the effort it takes. Turns out it needs php, mysql and fastcgi running, since I’m running a python/postgres stack it adds quite a bit of clutter onto the server…

But anyway: here you are, the following guide installs Matomo with…

• php8
• mysql 8.0
• nginx / letsencrypt
• php-fpm (fastcgi)

I wanted to get rid of AWS secrets manager - both because it was eating 7% of my hosting costs (2.42$ per month, but still :) and I wanted to get a bit more independent of AWS.

The number one alternative is Hashicorp Vault. From the same company who built Terraform, Consul and Vagrant.

The learning curve is not steep - I followed their excellent getting started guide. But if you want to have it even quicker, then use this guide.

For this how-to I chose:

• Amazon linux ec2 instance
• S3 as storage backend for
• Nginx for ssl proxy
• Python client

Exchanging any of those is a piece of cake really… but in order to keep this document brief I’ll stick to this choice.

Over the past 2 weeks I struggled quite a bit to come up with a setup to make my flutter app work together with my flask web app. There’s not much documentation online, I’m wondering if I’m the only one with that setup. I doubt that, as Flutters web capabilities are still somehow limited and you’d normally want to have a “full blown” flask web app alongside your flutter app.

What I wanted is to have a login possibility with social login providers (Google, Facebook, Apple ID, via Oauth) both on Flutter and on my Flask app and when a user uses both web and app they would use the same profile and settings.

Where I was mentally stuck was this: How do I guarantee that the OAuth identity which the flutter app would send to my flask api backend can be trusted? Every app can be decompiled, you can put a proxy in front of it or whatever other hacks the internet provides. So flask needs a mechanism to double-check what flutter just sent.

Using Firebase auth in Flask is currently under-documented on the web. I spent hours scraping together the relevant information which, I hope, I can present here in a good form - in order to improve the world and achieve world peace!

For a Flask app I’m running nginx on an Amazon Linux 2. To install letsencrypt (auto renewing SSL certificate):

This howto…

• installs postgres13
• creates a first database
• sets postgres password
• makes postgres reachable from outside

This howto assumes that you

• created your ec2 already with Amazon Linux on it (I personally use lightsail as have great prices and IMO are a bit cheaper than ec2 instances, but there’s no difference on OS level)
• opened port 80 (http) and 22 (ssh)