Dam Dash

Plotly Dash (Flask) web app for looking at some dam levels.

How to deploy on a windows server using IIS

If you're unfortunate enough to have to deploy a Dash app on a Windows server, here's how you can do it.

Clone the repo.

First you need to put the file where IIS can see it. I find it easiest to put it in the wwwroot folder. This is usually located in C:\inetpub\wwwroot. In my case I wasn't able to clone the repository directly into the wwwroot folder because I didn't have the permissions to do so. So I cloned the repository into a different folder and then copied the files into the wwwroot folder.

Once you have your files in the wwwroot folder, we need to tell IIS how to run this app. We do that by making a file called web.config in the root of the app. The web.config file should look something like this:

Install Python and the required packages.

Assuming you have the necessary permissions, you can install Python. I used Python 3.12, but anything later than 3.6 should work. You can download Python from the official website.

Create the virtual environment.

We need to create a virtual environment for the app to run in. You can do this by running the following command in the command prompt:

python3 -m venv /path/to/venv

You can activate the virtual environment by running the following command:

source /path/to/venv/Scripts/activate

Install the required packages.

With an activated venv you can install the required packages by running the following command:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Now on the IIS side of things.

For the most part I used this guide to set all of this up: https://medium.com/@b-nouri/how-to-deploy-your-dash-app-on-iis-windows-server-98a16b8707e1