Production environments are not like your laptop.

A production-ready Flask app typically needs:

Must-do checklist

• Debug mode disabled
• Secrets stored in environment variables
• A production WSGI server (Gunicorn) instead of flask runflask run
• Proper logging
• HTTPS termination (usually via Nginx or platform)
• Error handling (friendly pages or JSON)
• Database migrations
• Static file handling

The biggest production mistake

Running:

• flask runflask run

on a production server.

Use Gunicorn (or another WSGI server) instead.

Configuration mindset

Your app should be configured by:

• environment variables

Not by editing code per environment.

Health endpoints

Many deployments benefit from:

• /health/health endpoint returning 200

So monitoring systems can detect downtime.

Observability

Have some plan for:

• request logs
• error logs
• basic metrics

Even a simple setup is better than none.