🚀 Mini Todo API

A hands-on FastAPI project for practicing Git, CI/CD, security, Linux, and AWS EC2 deployment.

📌 About the Project

Mini Todo API is a deliberately small Python FastAPI application created primarily as a practical DevOps learning environment.

The application itself is intentionally simple. The main objective was to understand how an application moves from source code to a live server while practicing real-world development and DevOps workflows.

This project covers:

Git & GitHub workflows
Branching and Pull Requests
Merge conflicts and Git history
GitHub Actions
Continuous Integration
Automated testing
Dependency and security checks
Secure secrets handling
Linux server administration
AWS EC2
systemd service management
Application deployment
Live API verification

🔄 Git-to-Deployment Workflow

flowchart LR
    A[💻 Local Development] --> B[Git]
    B --> C[GitHub]
    C --> D[Pull Request]
    D --> E[GitHub Actions]
    E --> F[🧪 Automated Testing]
    F --> G[🔐 Security Checks]
    G --> H[✅ CI]
    H --> I[☁️ AWS EC2]
    I --> J[🐧 Linux Server]
    J --> K[⚙️ systemd]
    K --> L[🚀 Live FastAPI API]

Workflow in simple terms

Code
 ↓
Git
 ↓
GitHub
 ↓
Pull Request
 ↓
GitHub Actions
 ↓
Testing & Security Checks
 ↓
Continuous Integration
 ↓
AWS EC2
 ↓
Linux + systemd
 ↓
Live API

🛠️ Technologies & Tools

Technology	Purpose
🐍 Python	Application development
⚡ FastAPI	REST API framework
🔧 Git	Version control
🐙 GitHub	Source code & collaboration
⚙️ GitHub Actions	CI automation
🧪 Pytest	Automated testing
☁️ AWS EC2	Cloud infrastructure
🐧 Linux	Server environment
⚙️ systemd	Application service management
🔗 REST API	Application communication

📂 Project Structure

mini-todo-api/
│
├── .github/
│   └── workflows/
│       └── ...
│
├── app/
│   └── main.py
│
├── tests/
│   └── ...
│
├── .gitignore
├── README.md
└── requirements.txt

🧩 What I Practiced

1. Git & GitHub

Practiced the complete Git workflow, including:

Feature branches
Branch merging
Pull Requests
Merge conflicts
Commit history
Reset
Revert
Squash
Cherry-pick
Stash
GitHub repository management

2. CI with GitHub Actions

Implemented Continuous Integration using GitHub Actions.

The CI workflow automatically performs validation when changes are pushed or submitted through Pull Requests.

Push / Pull Request
        ↓
GitHub Actions
        ↓
Install Dependencies
        ↓
Run Tests
        ↓
Security / Dependency Checks
        ↓
CI Result

I also intentionally worked through failed CI runs to understand how pipeline failures can be investigated, debugged, and fixed.

3. Testing & Security

Practiced:

Automated testing with pytest
Dependency management
Dependency/security checks
Secure secrets handling
Dependabot
CODEOWNERS
CI validation

4. AWS EC2 & Linux

Deployed the application to an AWS EC2 Linux server.

Practiced:

EC2 instance configuration
SSH access
Linux administration
Python environment setup
Application process management
Port configuration
Troubleshooting
Server-side application verification

5. systemd & Deployment

Configured the FastAPI application as a Linux systemd service.

This allowed the application to run as a managed background service rather than depending on an active SSH session.

The deployment was then verified through live API endpoints.

🖼️ Project Screenshots

GitHub Repository

GitHub Actions — CI Pipeline

AWS EC2 — Linux Server

🚀 Live FastAPI Deployment

💻 Run Locally

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/tanahmeeedsx/mini-todo-api.git
cd mini-todo-api

2. Create a virtual environment

python -m venv venv

Linux / macOS

source venv/bin/activate

Windows

venv\Scripts\activate

3. Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Start the application

uvicorn app.main:app --reload

The application will run at:

http://127.0.0.1:8000

📖 API Documentation

FastAPI automatically generates interactive API documentation.

Once the application is running, open:

http://127.0.0.1:8000/docs

You can use the Swagger UI to explore and test the API endpoints directly from your browser.

OpenAPI specification:

http://127.0.0.1:8000/openapi.json

🧪 Run Tests

Run the automated test suite:

pytest

The same type of automated validation is also performed through the CI workflow.

☁️ AWS EC2 Deployment

The application was deployed to an AWS EC2 Linux server as part of the DevOps practice workflow.

Deployment process

AWS EC2
   ↓
SSH Access
   ↓
Linux Environment
   ↓
Python Virtual Environment
   ↓
Application Dependencies
   ↓
FastAPI + Uvicorn
   ↓
systemd Service
   ↓
Live API

The application was verified after deployment through API endpoints.

⚙️ systemd Service

The FastAPI application is managed using systemd.

This provides:

Background service execution
Automatic service management
Restart capability
Service status monitoring
Independence from an active SSH session

Useful commands:

sudo systemctl status mini-todo-api

sudo systemctl restart mini-todo-api

sudo systemctl stop mini-todo-api

sudo systemctl start mini-todo-api

🎯 Learning Objectives

The main purpose of this project was to gain practical experience with:

Git workflows
GitHub collaboration
Pull Requests
Branch management
CI/CD concepts
GitHub Actions
Automated testing
Security practices
Secrets management
Linux administration
AWS EC2
systemd
REST APIs
Cloud deployment
CI/CD troubleshooting

💡 Key Takeaway

The main lesson from this project was understanding that DevOps is not simply about deploying an application.

It is about connecting different stages of the software lifecycle:

Development
    ↓
Version Control
    ↓
Collaboration
    ↓
Testing
    ↓
Security
    ↓
Continuous Integration
    ↓
Infrastructure
    ↓
Deployment
    ↓
Verification

This small FastAPI application provided a practical environment for understanding how these components work together in an industry-style workflow.

🗺️ Future Improvements

Possible future improvements include:

📊 Project Status

Status: ✅ Completed

The project successfully demonstrates a practical Git-to-Deployment workflow using GitHub, GitHub Actions, Linux, AWS EC2, systemd, and FastAPI.

🔗 Repository

👨‍💻 Author

Tanjim Ahmed

DevOps / Cloud & Infrastructure Enthusiast

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
.github/workflows		.github/workflows
app		app
tests		tests
.gitignore		.gitignore
README.md		README.md
requirements.txt		requirements.txt

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