Installing and configuring Zappa

Installing Zappa is a straightforward task, but before we move ahead, we need to configure the prerequisites. Make sure you have Python 2.7 or Python 3.6 and have a valid AWS account. Now, you need to configure the AWS credentials on your machine with help awscli:

$ pip install awscli

Configure the AWS credentials using the aws configure command, as shown in the following screenshot:

The configuration for AWS credentials requires that you have an AWS Access Key ID, AWS Secret Access Key, Default region name, and a Default output format.

You can get AWS credential information from your My Security Credentials page, as shown in the following screenshot:

Once you've configured your AWS credentials, we can move ahead with Zappa's installation.

Zappa must be installed in a virtual environment. It's strongly recommended that you create a virtual environment and activate it before installing Zappa. I prefer to use the virtualenv tool. There are other tools available to manage your virtual environments:

$ virtualenv env -p python3.6

Here, we are creating a virtual environment named env and using python3.6, where -p indicates the Python version. Now, activate the virtual environment as follows:

$ source env/source/bin

We are set to go now, so let's install Zappa using pip:

$ pip install zappa

Now, we are ready to launch Zappa. In the following sections, we will be creating a small program to demonstrate how we can make Zappa's deployment serverless.