How to load a static file in Flask app when deploying to Heroku?

user_1354400 0
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I have a Flask JSON API application that would read a file in the code repository and display the data in that file. My application file is as follows:

from flask import Flask, jsonify

from utils import load_data


data = load_data(os.environ.get('DATA_FILE_PATH'))  # This would be in data/data.txt for example

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/', methods=['GET'])
def home():
    return jsonify(data=data)

When I deploy to Heroku, how can I set the environment variable to point to that particular data file? Locally, I would do

$ export DATA_FILE_PATH=/path/to/repo/data/data.txt

I know I can use the Heroku CLI heroku config:set DATA_FILE_PATH=<path> but I'm not sure how to place that path variable since I don't really know the directory structure on the Heroku deployment.

flask heroku static-files python
2 Answers

You can add them in the settings tab config vars Heroku settings tab

user_153736410

Okay, turns out you can go into the Heroku Dyno's bash using the following command (assuming you've already pushed to Heroku):

$ heroku run bash

and figure out what the file system structure looks like. In my particular case, my repo was served under the /app directory. So all I needed to pass into the value of the DATA_FILE_PATH environment variable is /app/data/data.txt.

user_13544000
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