Deploying your first FastAPI application on Amazon EC2

Hi there, in this article, we are going to learn how to deploy a fastAPI application to Amazon EC2 Ubuntu server with NGINX.

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a web service provided by Amazon Web Services that offers resizable virtual servers in the cloud. It allows developers, businesses, and organizations to run applications without needing to invest in physical hardware, providing flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.

NGINX is a high-performance web server, reverse proxy, and load balancer designed to efficiently handle client requests, serve static content, and secure applications. When hosting FastAPI on EC2, NGINX is used to act as a reverse proxy, forwarding client requests to the FastAPI app while improving security by hiding the backend server. It also provides load balancing to distribute traffic across multiple instances, SSL/TLS termination for secure HTTPS communication, efficient static content delivery to reduce backend load, and enhanced performance by handling more concurrent connections than Uvicorn alone, making the application more scalable and robust.

STEP 2: Launch an EC2 Instance

Select the ubuntu server, and any corresponding AMI(Preferably the default)

Select the desired instance type(t3.micro is recommended for development environments)
click “create new key pair”
- click create pair

Network Settings

Make sure the “Allow HTTP traffic” and “Allow HTTPs traffic” are ticked to allow you to access the app from the internet if needed.
then go ahead to launch the instance.

STEP 3: Connect to the EC2 Instance

Now your instance is up and running, select the instance and click “connect”.

Navigate to the “SSH Client” tab

Now copy the string, under “Example”, its the one you are going to use for connecting to the server through ssh.

Open a terminal of your choice
Navigate to the directory where you saved your key pair file
paste the code you copied above and click enter.

STEP 4: Configure the nginx and port redirection

Navigate to the nginx predefined location to create an nginx configuraton file.

sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/fastapi_nginx

Put the following code in the above opened file

server {
        listen 80;
        server_name 13.245.235.61;
        location / {
                proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;
        }
}

replace the server_name value with your instance’s public IP

Kindly note the above configuration is only allowing for HTTP connections, if you want to add HTTPs, add the port number 443.
Now restart the nginx server

sudo service nginx restart

STEP 5: Clonning your fastapi app into the server

From github, clone your repository into the server.
If you dont have any fastapi repository available, you can use the following for testing

git clone https://github.com/judahtc/test-fastapi-ec2.git

navigate to the created code folder

cd test-fastapi-ec2

STEP 6: Installing NGINX and python libraries

sudo apt install -y python3-pip nginx python3.12-venv

Creating a python virtual environment

python3 -m venv venv

Activate the virtual environment

source venv/bin/activate

install fastapi directly or from your requirements file

pip install fastapi[standard]

OR

pip install -r requirements.txt

Now start your uvicorn server

uvicorn main:app --port 8000

Now you are good to go, Paste your public IP into any web browser and your rest endpoints will appear.