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name: deployment-and-operations description: "Install, start, containerize, operate, and safely load-test the APOD Flask service." disable-model-invocation: true metadata: disco-role: operating license: Apache 2.0

Deployment and Operations

Use this sub-skill when the task is to install the public runtime dependencies, start APOD locally, run the production Gunicorn server, build or compose the container, perform a bounded startup check, or run the optional weighted Locust profile. The service is Python >=3.12 and the package metadata version is 1.1.0.

Route here for

• uv sync, public dependency installation, or a failed pip install -e .
• gunicorn application:app and port 5000 startup
• Docker image builds, Compose port mappings, and container startup
• Static/template asset checks and bounded service smoke checks
• A deliberately short Locust run against an explicitly named target

Route away

• APOD query parameters, response shapes, and endpoint semantics → api-service
• HTML scraping, media parsing, image handling, or parser behavior → parser-and-media
• Cross-cutting failure triage → root troubleshooting

Read next

1. Read installation for Python >=3.12, uv, public pip alternatives, and the flat-layout packaging caveat.
2. Read container deployment for the source Docker behavior and the adapted Compose template.
3. Read operations for bounded startup checks, Gunicorn, shutdown, and the optional Locust profile.
4. Read troubleshooting for packaging, import, port, asset, Docker, network, and credential-bound failures.

Safety boundaries

• External NASA APOD access is required for live /v1/apod scraping. Import, /, and static-asset checks are the default bounded checks; do not start a live load test as part of ordinary setup.
• Locust is a development-only optional group, not a minimum runtime dependency. Every load run must supply an explicit host and finite users, spawn rate, and run time.
• alchemy_api.key is credential-bound. Without that file, concept tagging is disabled by design; never bake credentials into an image, Compose asset, or command transcript.
• The application must run with its working directory at the checkout root so templates/, static/, and the optional key lookup resolve as intended.

Canonical production command

From a real checkout after dependencies are available, the production entry point is exactly:

gunicorn -w 4 -b 0.0.0.0:5000 --access-logfile - application:app

Use uv run gunicorn ... when uv owns the environment. The command starts a long-running service; use the bounded checks in operations first when the request is only to validate installation.