Deploying a chatbot written with the Flask framework

Question

I have created basic chatbot using FLASK framework and Python. This will create a default URL http://127.0.0.1/5000. Below link is similar to my chatbot. ex: https://dev.to/sahilrajput/build-a-chatbot-using-flask-in-5-minutes-574i

This link will work until the execution opened. If I end it, this URL will not work.

My requirement is to put this chatbot in another webpage (Like how IRCTC has Disha).

Please guide me how to proceed from here.

Answer 1

The thing you're trying to do is called deployment or deploying and application. Long story short, you'll need to rent space on somebody else's computer. This can be done at different providers, e.g.

• Heroku: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-python
• Digital Ocean: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/
• Amazon AWS: How to Deploy Flask app on AWS EC2 Linux/UNIX instance
• Google Cloud: https://towardsdatascience.com/deploy-a-dockerized-flask-app-to-google-cloud-platform-71d91b39b25e
• And many others..

Answer 2

Also as addition to fresskomas answer:

You will need a fixed external IP. Otherwise any ip-related api-calls in your code will fail when your provider changes your ip (which happens regularly if you don't order a fixed ip).

And when you do this on a local machine not exposed to the web, you probably need to forward your port in your router to allow external web-api callers to find your flask-chatbot.