With the advent of ABlooper, we’ve recently introduced OpenMM as a new dependency for the SAbDab-SAbPred antibody modelling platform. By far the easiest way to install the OpenMM Python API is via Conda, so we’ve moved to Conda environments for the entire platform. This has made installation of the platform much easier, but introduces complications when it comes to running its web applications under Apache. In this post, I’ll briefly explain the reason for this, and provide a basic guide for running Flask apps using Conda environments under Apache.

A common way of deploying a Flask web application in a production environment is to use an Apache server with the mod_wsgi module, which allows Apache to host any application that supports Python’s Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI), making it quick and easy to get an application up and running. In this post, we’ll go through configuring your Apache server to host multiple Python apps in a stable manner, including how to run apps in daemon mode and avoiding hanging processes due to Python C extensions not working well with Python sub-interpreters (I’m looking at you, numpy).