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DashLab

🧠 Overview

The goal of this project is to deepen my practical knowledge by exploring new frameworks and challenging myself through the development of a versatile, accessible application.

At its core, DashLab is a dashboard that serves as a centralized hub to launch various projects. These projects are designed as APIs to maximize flexibility and reusability.

Together with MindShelf, where I document detailed notes on the tools I use and discover, DashLab helps me track my progress, showcase my coding skills, and continuously improve by learning more efficient coding practices, production tips, and problem-solving strategies.

🛠️ Technologies Used

  • 🐍 Python Dash — by Plotly, for building the dashboard UI
  • ☁️ Amazon EC2 and Route 53 — for app deployment and DNS management
  • 🔐 Amazon Cognito and PyJWT — for user authentication and security
  • 🚀 FastAPI — for serving the backend APIs powering the projects
  • 🐳 Docker and Docker Compose — for streamlined local development and production deployment
  • 🌐 Caddy — for HTTPS management, simplifying SSL without needing an AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB)

🚀 Implementation Steps

  1. 📝 Project planning and identification of potential limitations
  2. 💻 Developing the multi-page dashboard in Python
  3. ☁️ Deploying the application on Amazon EC2
  4. 🧪 Thorough testing of the app’s functionality and performance
  5. ✨ Future enhancements: adding new projects to the dashboard and refining existing ones based on user needs and feedback

📌 Challenges Encountered

  • 🐳 Learning how to deploy containerized applications on AWS was a significant hurdle. Initially, I explored using a public ALB with ECS Fargate, then considered cost-reducing strategies such as private ALBs and VPC endpoints with CloudFront. Ultimately, I opted for direct deployment on an EC2 instance, linking its public IP to my domain with HTTPS managed by Caddy. This approach simplified deployment and reduced costs.

  • 🔐 Amazon Cognito’s built-in user management did not fully support my desired workflow of self-registration with email validation followed by admin approval to prevent unauthorized access and unexpected costs. To address this, I created a custom user attribute, approved, which must be set to true for users to access protected resources. The dashboard dynamically adjusts messages and navigation options based on this attribute. Additionally, I implemented a post-confirmation Lambda trigger to notify me via email whenever a new user registers and validates their email.

✨ What I Learned

  • 🌍 How to deploy a secure, globally accessible application with user authentication
  • 🔒 Managing HTTPS certificates easily using the open-source Caddy server
  • 🐳 Improving development and production workflows with Docker and Docker Compose