plash-cli

WARNING - Plash is in Beta and we have released it in its semi-stable state to gather early feedback to improve. We do not recommend hosting critical applications yet.

Usage

Installation

Install latest from the GitHub repository:

$ pip install git+https://github.com/AnswerDotAI/plash-cli.git

or from pypi

$ pip install plash-cli

Deploy Your First FastHTML App

Authentication

To use Plash, you’ll need to authenticate:

1. Signup for an account at https://pla.sh/
2. Activate your Plash subscription
3. Run plash_login in your terminal
4. A browser window will open for authentication
5. Once authenticated, your credentials will be saved locally

Create a FastHTML App

Create a directory for your FastHTML app, and go into it:

mkdir minimal
cd minimal

Create main.py containing:

from fasthtml.common import *

app, rt = fast_app()

@rt
def index():
    return H1("Hello world!")

serve()

Then create a requirements.txt containing:

python-fasthtml

Deploy your app

Run plash_deploy. Your app will be live at https://<app-name>.pla.sh. The URL will be shown in the deployment output.

Managing Your App

Plash CLI provides several commands to manage your apps:

• plash_login - Login to Plash
• plash_deploy - Deploy your app
• plash_view - Open your deployed app in a browser
• plash_start - Start your app if it’s stopped
• plash_stop - Stop your running app
• plash_logs - View your app’s logs
• plash_download - Download your deployed app files
• plash_delete - Delete your deployed app

App Dependencies

If your app needs additional dependencies to run, we offer a number of ways to have them included in your deployed app.

Python Dependencies

To have python dependencies installed in your deployed app, you can provide a requirements.txt and it will be pip installed. By default, all deployed apps have fasthtml as a dependency.

Non-Python Dependencies

For any other depencies of setup processes, you can provide a setup.sh which will be executed during the build step of your app. For example, you can use this to install apt packages (this is ran as root in your apps container, so omit any sudo):

#!/bin/bash
apt install <package_name>

Env Variables

If your app depends on secrets or other types of environment variables, you can have them available in your deployed app by providing a plash.env, which will be sourced during your apps startup. Here is an example:

export MY_ENV_VARIABLE=hijkl
export ANOTHER_SECRET=abcdef

Inside of your running container, we automatically set an environment variable (PLASH_PRODUCTION=1) so you are able to use it for checking if your application is inside a Plash deployment or not.

Databases

For apps that use persistent storage, we recommend sqlite. The docker container your app runs in has a working directory of /app which is a volume mounted to a folder that we hourly backup. Therefore, we recommend placing your sqlite database somewhere in that directory. Note when redeploying an app with plash_deploy, we automatically overwrite existing files with the same name as those uploaded. Therefore to prevent data loss, ensure any local database files do not clash with any deployed database names that your app may set up. You can use the environment variable PLASH_PRODUCTION, which we automatically set to 1 in your Plash container, to modify your apps behavior for local and production development. You can download any deployed database names by clicking the Download App button to get a compressed file of all files in your /app folder in your deployed app.

Deploy to Pla.sh via GitHub Actions

If you’d like to deploy your plash app every time you commit changes to your GitHub repo, you can use the following workflow to your .github/workflows/ folder in the root of your repo:

name: Deploy to Plash

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Set up Python
        uses: actions/setup-python@v4
        with:
          python-version: '3.x'

      - name: Create Plash config
        run: |
          mkdir -p ~/.config
          echo '${{ secrets.PLASH_CONFIG }}' > ~/.config/plash_config.json

      - name: Install plash-cli with pip
        run: pip install plash-cli

      - name: Deploy to Plash
        run: plash_deploy

It relies on storing your plash config as a secret named PLASH_CONFIG in your GitHub repo. After running plash_login, you can find these in ~/.config/plash_config.json (unless you haved changed the XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable). Learn more about GitHub secrets here.