I was asked to write a little web app for a small organization that could apply rudimentary password protection to some documents. The minimal needs of the organization allow a single username and password to be shared by all users.

I first thought of Django but a database was not desired, so I went for the simpler option of using Flask. I drew on the following sources.

• http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/0.10/tutorial/
• https://flask-login.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
• http://gouthamanbalaraman.com/blog/minimal-flask-login-example.html
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16627384/flask-login-with-static-user-always-yielding-401-unauthorized

First, do this (or whatever is equivalent) on your development machine.

sudo apt-get install -y ec2-ami-tools ec2-api-tools

Let's skip the virtual machine and go straight to EC2.

• Go to the EC2 console page and hit the big blue Launch Instance button.
• Choose the Ubuntu 64-bit server option and hit Continue.
• On the next page, make sure Auto-assign Public IP is ENABLED and that the instance belongs to a PUBLIC subnet.
• Two pages later, make sure you choose a security group with inbound traffic allowed on ports 22 (ssh) and 80 (http) for source 0.0.0.0/0, and all outbound traffic allowed for destination 0.0.0.0/0. Choose a key pair that you know you have access to.
• Review all your settings and launch. It will take several minutes for the instance to boot up.

Once the instance has started, do this on your local machine:

INSTANCE=ec2-52-1-12-222.compute-1.amazonaws.com     # for example
scp -i ~/.ec2/ec2.pem prep.sh ubuntu@${INSTANCE}:~
scp -i ~/.ec2/ec2.pem cruft.uue ubuntu@${INSTANCE}:~
ssh -i ~/.ec2/ec2.pem ubuntu@${INSTANCE}

Having SSHed into the instance, run prep.sh. Then you can cd into the eb-flaskapp directory and run the go.sh script. This will start a server process that runs the app.