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🚀 Lesson 01: Your First Chatbot - "Hello, Streamlit & Cloud Run!" 🌐

Welcome to the Google Cloud Gemini Cookbook! In this very first lesson, we're going to embark on an exciting journey: taking your Python code from a simple idea to a live web application in minutes. Forget complex setups; with Streamlit and Google Cloud Run, deploying your first web app is incredibly fast and fun! ✨

GitHub Source: Link

What You'll Learn 🎓

This lesson focuses on the essentials of getting a web application up and running quickly:

  1. Build a "Hello World" with Streamlit: Discover how effortlessly you can create interactive web apps using just Python. Streamlit handles all the front-end magic for you! 🐍
  2. Deploy to Google Cloud Run: Learn to take your Streamlit app and deploy it as a scalable, serverless container on Google Cloud Run. This means your app can handle traffic effortlessly, and you only pay for what you use! ☁️💸

By the end of this lesson, you'll have a fully functional web application accessible via a URL, demonstrating the incredible speed of modern cloud development. 🚀

Prerequisites 🛠️

Before we begin, ensure you have the following:

  • A Google Cloud Project with billing enabled.
  • The gcloud CLI installed and configured.
  • Python 3.8+ installed on your local machine.
  • pip (Python package installer).

For development, we recommend using the Google Cloud Shell, which comes pre-installed with the necessary tools.

What is Streamlit?

Streamlit is an open-source Python framework that makes it easy to create and share beautiful, custom web apps for machine learning and data science. In just a few lines of code, you can build and deploy powerful data apps.

While Streamlit is not as feature-rich as full-fledged web frameworks like Django or Flask, its strength lies in its simplicity and ability to create highly interactive applications quickly. This makes it an excellent choice for building demos and prototypes.

What is Google Cloud Run?

Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless platform that enables you to run stateless containers that are invocable via web requests or Pub/Sub events. You can deploy your code to Cloud Run, and it will automatically scale up or down based on traffic.

Here are some of the benefits of using Cloud Run:

  • Easy to use: Deploy your application with a single command.
  • Serverless: No infrastructure to manage.
  • Scalable: Automatically scales to meet demand.
  • Cost-effective: Pay only for the resources you use.

💻 Local Development: Your Streamlit "Hello World"

Let's start by creating a simple Streamlit application locally. Here's how you can do it:

1. Set up your environment

Create a virtual environment and install the required dependencies:

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Create a simple Streamlit app

Create a file named streamlit_app.py with the following content:

import streamlit as st

st.title("Sample AI App")

st.text("This is a sample app.")

3. Run the app locally

To run the app locally, use the following command:

streamlit run streamlit_app.py --server.port 8080

You should see your Streamlit app open in your browser and navigating to http://localhost:8080. Interact with it! This is your app running locally. 🚀

4. Deploy to Cloud Run

To deploy your app to Cloud Run, you'll need to create a Procfile and a deploy.sh script.

Procfile

Create a file named Procfile with the following content:

web: streamlit run streamlit_app.py --server.port=8080 --server.address=0.0.0.0 --server.enableCORS=false --browser.gatherUsageStats=false

This file tells Cloud Run how to start your application.

deploy.sh

Create a file named deploy.sh with the following content:

#!/bin/bash
# Purpose: To deploy the App to Cloud Run.

# Google Cloud Project ID
PROJECT="your-gcp-project-id"

# Google Cloud Region
LOCATION="us-central1"

# Deploy app from source code
gcloud run deploy simple-app --source . --region=$LOCATION --project=$PROJECT --allow-unauthenticated

Important: Replace "your-gcp-project-id" with your actual Google Cloud Project ID.

Now, run the deployment script:

bash deploy.sh

This command will build a container image from your source code, push it to the container registry, and deploy it to Cloud Run. Once the deployment is complete, you'll see a service URL in the output.

Congratulations 🎉! You have successfully deployed your Streamlit app to Cloud Run.

Cleanup

To avoid incurring future charges, delete the resources you created:

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