Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Tips for debugging Flask deployments to Azure App Service

There are many ways to deploy Flask web apps to App Service: Azure CLI, VS Code Azure Tools extension, Azure Developer CLI, or GitHub-based deployments. Unfortunately, sometimes a deploy fails, and it can be hard at first to understand what's wrong. Regardless of how you deploy Flask to App Service, you can follow these tips for debugging the deployment.

After you finish deploying, first visit the app URL to see if it loads. If it does, amazing! If it doesn't, here are steps you can take to figure out what went wrong.

Check the deployment logs

Select Deployment Center from the side navigation menu, then select Logs. You should see a timestamped list of recent deploys:

Check whether the status of the most recent deploy is "Success (Active)" or "Failed". If it's success, the deployment logs might still reveal issues, and if it's failed, the logs should certainly reveal the issue.

Click the commit ID to open the logs for the most recent deploy. First scroll down to see if any errors or warnings are reported at the end. This is what you'll hopefully see if all went well:

Now scroll back up to find the timestamp with the label "Running oryx build". Oryx is the open source tool that builds apps for App Service, Functions, and other platforms, across all the supported MS languages. Click the Show logs link next to that label. That will pop open detailed logs at the bottom. Scroll down.

Here's what a successful Oryx build looks like for a Flask application:


Command: oryx build /tmp/zipdeploy/extracted -o /home/site/wwwroot --platform python --platform-version 3.10 -p virtualenv_name=antenv --log-file /tmp/build-debug.log  -i /tmp/8db773a0e30ccc6 --compress-destination-dir | tee /tmp/oryx-build.log
Operation performed by Microsoft Oryx, https://github.com/Microsoft/Oryx
You can report issues at https://github.com/Microsoft/Oryx/issues

Oryx Version: 0.2.20230508.1, Commit: 7fe2bf39b357dd68572b438a85ca50b5ecfb4592, ReleaseTagName: 20230508.1

Build Operation ID: 164fee7dc4083f79
Repository Commit : 6e78c534-da03-414e-acc1-e396b92b1405
OS Type           : bullseye
Image Type        : githubactions

Detecting platforms...
Detected following platforms:
  python: 3.10.8
Version '3.10.8' of platform 'python' is not installed. Generating script to install it...

Using intermediate directory '/tmp/8db773a0e30ccc6'.

Copying files to the intermediate directory...
Done in 0 sec(s).

Source directory     : /tmp/8db773a0e30ccc6
Destination directory: /home/site/wwwroot


Downloading and extracting 'python' version '3.10.8' to '/tmp/oryx/platforms/python/3.10.8'...
Detected image debian flavor: bullseye.
Downloaded in 2 sec(s).
Verifying checksum...
Extracting contents...
performing sha512 checksum for: python...
Done in 18 sec(s).

image detector file exists, platform is python..
OS detector file exists, OS is bullseye..
Python Version: /tmp/oryx/platforms/python/3.10.8/bin/python3.10
Creating directory for command manifest file if it does not exist
Removing existing manifest file
Python Virtual Environment: antenv
Creating virtual environment...
Activating virtual environment...
Running pip install...
[18:13:30+0000] Collecting Flask==2.3.2
[18:13:30+0000]   Downloading Flask-2.3.2-py3-none-any.whl (96 kB)
[18:13:30+0000]      ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 96.9/96.9 kB 4.8 MB/s eta 0:00:00
[18:13:31+0000] Collecting itsdangerous>=2.1.2
[18:13:31+0000]   Downloading itsdangerous-2.1.2-py3-none-any.whl (15 kB)
[18:13:31+0000] Collecting click>=8.1.3
[18:13:31+0000]   Downloading click-8.1.3-py3-none-any.whl (96 kB)
[18:13:31+0000]      ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 96.6/96.6 kB 5.4 MB/s eta 0:00:00
[18:13:31+0000] Collecting Werkzeug>=2.3.3
[18:13:31+0000]   Downloading Werkzeug-2.3.6-py3-none-any.whl (242 kB)
[18:13:31+0000]      ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 242.5/242.5 kB 8.7 MB/s eta 0:00:00
[18:13:31+0000] Collecting blinker>=1.6.2
[18:13:31+0000]   Downloading blinker-1.6.2-py3-none-any.whl (13 kB)
[18:13:31+0000] Collecting Jinja2>=3.1.2
[18:13:31+0000]   Downloading Jinja2-3.1.2-py3-none-any.whl (133 kB)
[18:13:31+0000]      ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 133.1/133.1 kB 6.9 MB/s eta 0:00:00
[18:13:32+0000] Collecting MarkupSafe>=2.0
[18:13:32+0000]   Downloading MarkupSafe-2.1.3-cp310-cp310-manylinux_2_17_x86_64.manylinux2014_x86_64.whl (25 kB)
[18:13:33+0000] Installing collected packages: MarkupSafe, itsdangerous, click, blinker, Werkzeug, Jinja2, Flask
[18:13:35+0000] Successfully installed Flask-2.3.2 Jinja2-3.1.2 MarkupSafe-2.1.3 Werkzeug-2.3.6 blinker-1.6.2 click-8.1.3 itsdangerous-2.1.2

[notice] A new release of pip available: 22.2.2 -> 23.1.2
[notice] To update, run: pip install --upgrade pip
Not a vso image, so not writing build commands
Preparing output...

Copying files to destination directory '/tmp/_preCompressedDestinationDir'...
Done in 3 sec(s).
Compressing content of directory '/tmp/_preCompressedDestinationDir'...
Copied the compressed output to '/home/site/wwwroot'

Removing existing manifest file
Creating a manifest file...
Manifest file created.
Copying .ostype to manifest output directory.

Done in 70 sec(s).

Look for these important steps in the Oryx build:

  • Detected following platforms: python: 3.10.8
    That should match your runtime in the App Service configuration.
  • Running pip install...
    That should install all the requirements in your requirements.txt - if it didn't find your requirements.txt, then you won't see the packages installed.

If you see all those steps in the Oryx build, then that's a good sign that the build went well, and you can move on to checking the App Service logs.

Check the log stream

Under the Monitoring section of the side nav, select Log stream. Scroll to the timestamp corresponding to your most recent deploy.

The logs should start with pulling Docker images:

Screenshot of Log stream in App Service

Here are the full logs for a Flask app successfully starting in an App Service container:


2023-06-27T20:00:33.556Z INFO  - 3.10_20230519.2.tuxprod Pulling from appsvc/python
2023-06-27T20:00:33.559Z INFO  -  Digest: sha256:d7f1824d43ab89f90ec317f32a801ecffd4321a3d4a710593658be9bd980cd22
2023-06-27T20:00:33.560Z INFO  -  Status: Image is up to date for mcr.microsoft.com/appsvc/python:3.10_20230519.2.tuxprod
2023-06-27T20:00:33.563Z INFO  - Pull Image successful, Time taken: 0 Minutes and 0 Seconds
2023-06-27T20:00:34.710Z INFO  - Starting container for site
2023-06-27T20:00:34.711Z INFO  - docker run -d --expose=8000 --name flask-server-core-7icehkhjdeox2-appservice_5_edde42ea -e WEBSITE_CORS_ALLOWED_ORIGINS=https://portal.azure.com,https://ms.portal.azure.com -e WEBSITE_CORS_SUPPORT_CREDENTIALS=False -e WEBSITE_SITE_NAME=flask-server-core-7icehkhjdeox2-appservice -e WEBSITE_AUTH_ENABLED=False -e WEBSITE_ROLE_INSTANCE_ID=0 -e WEBSITE_HOSTNAME=flask-server-core-7icehkhjdeox2-appservice.azurewebsites.net -e WEBSITE_INSTANCE_ID=a822bcb6dd314caab4bd83084cc7a3991e4965ec4f97b7ce99c0ca46861dc419 -e HTTP_LOGGING_ENABLED=1 -e WEBSITE_USE_DIAGNOSTIC_SERVER=False appsvc/python:3.10_20230519.2.tuxprod  
2023-06-27T20:00:37.357175818Z    _____                               
2023-06-27T20:00:37.357230418Z   /  _  \ __________ _________   ____  
2023-06-27T20:00:37.357235518Z  /  /_\  \\___   /  |  \_  __ \_/ __ \ 
2023-06-27T20:00:37.357239618Z /    |    \/    /|  |  /|  | \/\  ___/ 
2023-06-27T20:00:37.357243418Z \____|__  /_____ \____/ |__|    \___  >
2023-06-27T20:00:37.357247318Z         \/      \/                  \/ 
2023-06-27T20:00:37.357251218Z A P P   S E R V I C E   O N   L I N U X
2023-06-27T20:00:37.357254918Z 
2023-06-27T20:00:37.357258418Z Documentation: http://aka.ms/webapp-linux
2023-06-27T20:00:37.357261918Z Python 3.10.11
2023-06-27T20:00:37.357282418Z Note: Any data outside '/home' is not persisted
2023-06-27T20:00:41.641875105Z Starting OpenBSD Secure Shell server: sshd.
2023-06-27T20:00:41.799900179Z App Command Line not configured, will attempt auto-detect
2023-06-27T20:00:42.761658829Z Starting periodic command scheduler: cron.
2023-06-27T20:00:42.761688529Z Launching oryx with: create-script -appPath /home/site/wwwroot -output /opt/startup/startup.sh -virtualEnvName antenv -defaultApp /opt/defaultsite
2023-06-27T20:00:42.876778283Z Found build manifest file at '/home/site/wwwroot/oryx-manifest.toml'. Deserializing it...
2023-06-27T20:00:42.887163588Z Build Operation ID: 820645c3a1e60b5e
2023-06-27T20:00:42.890123289Z Oryx Version: 0.2.20230512.3, Commit: a81ce1fa16b6e03d37f79d3ba5e99cf09b28e4ef, ReleaseTagName: 20230512.3
2023-06-27T20:00:42.897199993Z Output is compressed. Extracting it...
2023-06-27T20:00:42.964545124Z Extracting '/home/site/wwwroot/output.tar.gz' to directory '/tmp/8db774903eba755'...
2023-06-27T20:00:46.203967540Z App path is set to '/tmp/8db774903eba755'
2023-06-27T20:00:46.728397586Z Detected an app based on Flask
2023-06-27T20:00:46.730162987Z Generating `gunicorn` command for 'app:app'
2023-06-27T20:00:46.770331805Z Writing output script to '/opt/startup/startup.sh'
2023-06-27T20:00:47.050828437Z Using packages from virtual environment antenv located at /tmp/8db774903eba755/antenv.
2023-06-27T20:00:47.052387737Z Updated PYTHONPATH to '/opt/startup/app_logs:/tmp/8db774903eba755/antenv/lib/python3.10/site-packages'
2023-06-27T20:00:50.406265801Z [2023-06-27 20:00:50 +0000] [67] [INFO] Starting gunicorn 20.1.0
2023-06-27T20:00:50.434991028Z [2023-06-27 20:00:50 +0000] [67] [INFO] Listening at: http://0.0.0.0:8000 (67)
2023-06-27T20:00:50.441222333Z [2023-06-27 20:00:50 +0000] [67] [INFO] Using worker: sync
2023-06-27T20:00:50.473174263Z [2023-06-27 20:00:50 +0000] [70] [INFO] Booting worker with pid: 70
2023-06-27T20:00:53.772011632Z 169.254.130.1 - - [27/Jun/2023:20:00:53 +0000] "GET /robots933456.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 91 "-" "HealthCheck/1.0"
2023-06-27T20:00:55.268900825Z 169.254.130.5 - - [27/Jun/2023:20:00:55 +0000] "GET /robots933456.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 91 "-" "HealthCheck/1.0"

2023-06-27T20:01:47.691011982Z 169.254.130.5 - - [27/Jun/2023:20:01:47 +0000] "GET /hello HTTP/1.1" 200 183 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/113.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/113.0.1774.57"

A few notable logs:

  • 2023-06-27T18:22:17.803525340Z Detected an app based on Flask
    This log indicates that Oryx auto-detected a Flask app (by inspecting the requirements.txt) file.
  • 2023-06-27T18:22:17.803557841Z Generating `gunicorn` command for 'app:app'
    This indicates the Oryx detected an app.py file and assumes it has an app object inside it.
  • 2023-06-27T18:22:42.540158812Z [2023-06-27 18:22:42 +0000] [67] [INFO] Starting gunicorn 20.1.0
    That's the start of the gunicorn server serving the Flask app. After it starts, the logs should show HTTP requests.

If you aren't seeing the full logs, it's possible that your deploy happened too long ago and the portal has deleted some logs. In that case, open the Log stream and do another deploy, and you should see the full logs.

Downloading the logs

Alternatively, you can download the full logs from the Kudu interface. Select Advanced Tools from the side nav:

Screenshot of Azure Portal side nav with Advanced Tools selected

When the Kudu website loads, find the Current Docker Logs link and select Download as zip next to it:

Screenshot of website list of links

In the downloaded zip file, find the filename that starts with the most recent date and ends with "_default_docker.log":

Screenshot of extracted zip folder with files

Open that file to see the full logs, with the most recent logs at the bottom.

Wednesday, June 21, 2023

Best practices for prompting GitHub Copilot in VS Code

I've been using GitHub Copilot for the last six months in repositories large and small, old and new. For me, GitHub Copilot is the pair programmer that I never knew I wanted. It gives me great suggestions most of the time, but it doesn't give me the social anxiety I feel when a human is watching me code.

In this post, I'm going to share my best practices for prompting GitHub Copilot, to help all of you get great suggestions as often as possible. At a high level, my recommendation is to provide context and be predictable.

For more details, watch my YouTube video or keep reading.

Provide context

GitHub Copilot was trained on a huge number of examples, so for a given line of code, it may have many possible predictions for the next line of code. We can try to narrow down those possibilities with the context around our line of code.

  1. Open files: LLMs like GitHub Copilot have limited "context windows", so it can't keep an entire codebase in its window at once. But GitHub still wants to give Copilot some context, so if your editor has some files open, GitHub may send the contents of those files to Copilot. I recommend keeping files open that are the most relevant to the code you're writing: the tested file if you're writing tests, an example data file if you're processing data, the helper functions for a program, etc.

    Screenshot of three tabs open in VS Code

    As I showed in the video at 10:02, sometimes there are a few files relevant to the context: one that demonstrates the format of the new file (e.g. the new views.py has a similar format to the existing views.py), and one that provides the data for the new file (e.g. the new views.py uses the classes from models.py).

  2. Comments: You can write comments at many levels: high-level file comments that describe the purpose of the file and how it relates to the rest of the project, function-level comments, class-level comments, and line comments. The most helpful comments are ones that clear up potentially ambiguous aspects of code. For example, if you're writing a function that processes lists in Python, your function-level comment could clarify whether it returns a brand new list or mutates the existing list. That sort of distinction fundamentally changes the implementation.

    def capitalize_titles(book_titles):  
    
      """Returns a new list of book_titles with each title capitalized"""
    
  3. Imports: Many languages require you to explicitly important standard library or third-party modules at the top of a file. That information can be really helpful for Copilot to decide how it's going to write the desired code. For example, if you're using Python to scrape a webpage, then importing urllib3 and BeautifulSoup at the top will immediately guide Copilot to write the most appropriate code.

  4. Names: I have always been a fan of descriptive names, as I was brought up in a Java household, but now I have additional motivation to use fairly descriptive names: more context for Copilot. For example, if your code parses a JSON file and stores the result, you might use a variable name like data. However, if you know that result is actually a list, and each item describes a book, a more helpful variable name would be books. That indicates the variable likely holds a sequence-type object, and that each object inside represents a book.

    books = json.loads(open('books.json'))
  5. Types: If you are coding in a language where typing is optional (like Python or JavaScript), you may want to consider adding types, at least to parameters and return values. That can help narrow down the possible lines of code for completing a block of code.

    def capitalize_titles(book_titles:list[str]) -> list[str]:

As I showed in the video at 1:46, I sometimes change the names or types of Copilot generated code, to give it more context for the code coming afterwards.

Many of the above practices are generally beneficial for your codebase regardless of whether you use GitHub Copilot, like descriptive names and type annotations. As for comments, I keep the block-level comments in my code but remove line-level comments that seem redundant. Your final code has two audiences, the computer interpreting it and the humans reading it, so keep the practices that produce code that is both correct and clear.

Be predictable

LLMS like GitHub Copilot are very good with patterns. You show it a pattern, and it very much wants to keep the pattern going. Programming is already inherently pattern-filled, due to having to follow the syntax of a language, but there are ways to make your programs even more "pattern-ful".

  1. Variable naming conventions: Use a naming scheme that makes it easier to predict the way a variable should be used, especially if that naming scheme is already a convention for the language. For example, the Python language doesn't technically have constants, but it's still conventional to use all caps for a variable that shouldn't change, like PLANCK_CONSTANT. Another convention is to append an "s" suffix for variables that hold array-like objects. You may also have conventions for your particular codebase, like always starting getter functions with "_get_". Copilot will learn those conventions as well, if you are consistent with them.

  2. Structured software architecture: Just like humans, Copilot doesn't do that great with spaghetti code. What functions goes where? What function comes next? It really helps, for you and Copilot, to organize your code in a predictable manner, especially if you can use a popular framework for doing so. For example, the Django framework for Python always modularizes code into "models.py", "views.py", "urls.py", and a "templates" folder. When Copilot is inside one of those files, it has a better idea of what belongs there.

Use linters

My final tip isn't so much about how to use Copilot itself, but more about how to use VS Code along with Copilot. VS Code can basically become another pair programmer for you, by installing linting tools and enabling them to work in real-time. That way, if Copilot does give a bad suggestion (like an old method name or an incorrect chain of function calls), you'll immediately see a squiggle.

Screenshot of Python code with squiggly line under one line

Then you can hover over the squiggle to see the error report and check the Intellisense for the functions to see their expected parameters and return values. If you're still not sure how to fix it, search the relevant documentation for more guidance. If you have Copilot chat enabled, you can even try asking Copilot to fix it.

A linter won't be able to catch all issues, of course, so you should still be running the code and writing tests to feel confident in the code. But linters can catch quite a few issues and prevent your code from going down a wrong path, so I recommend real-time linters in any Copilot setup.

For linting in Python, I typically use the Ruff extension along with these settings:

"python.linting.enabled": true, 
"[python]": { 
  "editor.formatOnSave": true, 
  "editor.codeActionsOnSave": { 
    "source.fixAll": true 
  } 
}

Learn more

Here are some additional guides to help you be productive with GitHub Copilot:

Friday, June 2, 2023

Providing feedback on the VS Code Python experience

My current role as a Python cloud advocate at Microsoft is to make sure Python developers have a great experience using Microsoft products, including my current favorite IDE, VS Code. As much as I love VS Code, it still has bugs (all software does!), so I often find myself filing issues. It can be a little tricky to figure out where to file issues, as there are multiple GitHub repos involved, so I'm writing this post to help others figure out what to post where.

github.com/microsoft/vscode
The primary VS Code repo. This is typically not the place for Python-specific issues, but if your feedback doesn't fit anywhere else, this might be where it goes, and the triagers can direct you elsewhere if needed.
github.com/orgs/community/discussions/categories/codespaces
Discussion forum for issues that seem specific to GitHub Codespaces (e.g. forwarded ports not opening).
github.com/microsoft/vscode-remote-release
Similarly, this is the repo for the VS Code Dev Containers extension, appropriate for issues that only happen when opening a project in a Dev Container locally.
github.com/devcontainers/images
The repo that generates the mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers Docker images. If you're using a Dev Container with a Python image from that registry and think the issue stems from the image, report it here. Consult the README first, however.
github.com/microsoft/vscode-python
The repo for the Python extension that's responsible for much of the Python-specific experience. The extension does build upon various open-source projects, however. See below.
github.com/microsoft/pylance-release
The repo for the library that provides the linting/error reports in VS Code. When you get squiggles in your Python code in VS Code and hover over them, you should see in the popup whether the error comes from Pylance or a different extension. If you haven't installed any other extensions besides the Python one, then it's almost certainly from Pylance.
github.com/microsoft/debugpy
The repo for the library that provides part of the Python debugger experience in VS Code. For example, if it's not showing local variables correctly in the debug sidebar, that's an issue for debugpy.
github.com/microsoft/vscode-jupyter
The repo for the Jupyter extension that makes ipynb notebooks work well in VS Code. This extension used to be downloaded along with the Python extension but must now be installed separately. If it's a notebook-specific issue, it probably goes here.

Whenever you're filing an issue, be sure to provide as much information as possible. Thanks for helping us make the Python experience better!