Spelling Bee

Just a simple spelling bee game :) Here I would talk about how to run in your local machine and for deployment. All the coding was done on Linux (Fedora btw) so it might be different for other OS/distributions.

Running Locally

Start off by installing redis

sudo dnf install redis    
sudo systemctl start redis
sudo systemctl enable redis
redis-cli ping

Create a venv with python 3.11 , I am using uv here. Then install the dependencies

uv venv name-of-venv --python 3.11
uv pip install -r requirements.txt

Git clone

git clone https://github.com/ZeroMeOut/spelling-bee
cd spelling-bee

Run app

uvicorn app:app

Deployment

For deployment I am using an EC2 instance be cause I don't want to set ElasticCache (I think that's the one) for Redis. I also just wanted to learn EC2 in general. Firstly you set up an EC2 instance. You can use this tutorial, just be sure to use Ubuntu instead of AWS linux (I find the former more convenient). Then you ssh into it, create a setup.sh file with vim setup.sh and then paste the following

echo "Starting setup"

sudo apt update -y  && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install docker.io docker-compose git nginx -y

echo "Docker stuff"
sudo systemctl enable --now  docker
sudo groupadd docker
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

echo "Git Stuff"
git clone https://github.com/ZeroMeOut/spelling-bee
cd spelling-bee

docker-compose up --build -d --remove-orphans

echo "Nginx stuff"
sudo tee /etc/nginx/sites-available/spelling-bee > /dev/null <<'EOF'
server {
        listen 80;
        server_name _;
        
        location / {
                 proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;
                 proxy_set_header Host $host;
                 proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
                 proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
                 proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        }
}

EOF

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/spelling-bee /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
sudo rm -f /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
sudo systemctl restart nginx

echo "Done"

Then save it by pressing Esc into :wq and run bash setup.sh. I noticed that when the docker-compose up --build -d --remove-orphans runs the setup fails, but just exit the instance and ssh into again, then run the shell file again. Idk why exactly it works but it does. Here is where I found the solution :)

Random Rambling

This project took me like a week to finish, could be less if I remove the days I was procrastinating lmao. At first I was using apis for the definitions and words but I then thought "Hmm I think I could make it all local", so I did with nltk's wordnet and brown. The set is umm alright and it did introduce me to LRU (Least-Recently-Used) cache which I didn't know existed. I should really read on that, I should read on a lot of things.

For the TTS model it's alright as well for a very light weight model. Honestly I just browsed through r/LocalLLaMA and picked the one that gave me less fraustation to setup. My friends are annoyed with it tho XD, so I am planning to using a more powerful TTS model and just store the audios in an S3 bucket or something.

The backend done by me, frontend entirely vibecoded by Claude (I will complete the Odin Project someday trust).

Honestly learned a lot doing this, it was fun. I will make improvements here and there before moving to another project, and the site would keep running until it cooks my budget. Until the next :)

Acknowledgements

• This wonderful channel
• Another wonderful channel
• r/LocalLLaMA