The files you need in your app configuration to deploy it to Railway

Watch the full video tutorial: How to Deploy a Flask App to Railway

.gitignore

Procfile

requirements.txt

.gitignore

This is where you’ll declare the files you don’t want to commit to your GitHub repo (e.g. .env file). Remember that you'll need a .env local file to store your environment variables for local testing.

Procfile (to start the deployment)

web: gunicorn **main**:app

generate requirements.txt

This will list all the packages you’ll need to install on your server.

pip install pipreqs

pipreqs .
pipreqs . --force to regenerate the requirements.txt file
pipreqs . --ignore .venv to ignore a specific directory

Make sure you’re using those packages (sometimes pipreqs can suggest the wrong ones)

mysql-connector-python==8.0.33
gunicorn==21.1.0

MySQL DB Connection logic. Quick boilerplate to get you started.

from flask import **g**
import mysql.connector
from dotenv import load_dotenv
import os

load_dotenv()

# get sql pw from .env
db_password = os.environ.get('MYSQLPASSWORD')

# MySQL configuration
DATABASE_URL = f"mysql -hroundhouse.proxy.rlwy.net -uroot -p{db_password} --port 50259 --protocol=TCP railway"

DATABASE_CONFIG = {
            'user': 'root',
            'password': os.environ.get('MYSQLPASSWORD'),
            'host': 'roundhouse.proxy.rlwy.net',
            'port': '50259',
            'database': 'railway'
        }

def get_db():
    if hasattr(g, 'db_conn') and g.db_conn.is_connected():
        return g.db_conn
    else:
        g.db_conn = mysql.connector.connect(**DATABASE_CONFIG)
        return g.db_conn

@app.teardown_appcontext
def close_db_connection(exception):
    db = getattr(g, 'db_conn', None)
    if db is not None:
        db.close()