Few months ago I just started a website to publish my experiements and test my coding skills. I posted about it before here . For the very same website I needed to renew my Let's Encrypt certificates. While doing so, I delved into a side track which was a deadend so I decided to post about it for myself as a reminder also for someone who might use it.
I am publishing this under basics as it is a recurring process and an important part of the deployment. Later on I will post about how to automate the process. For now this is following certbot manual process with DNS Challange.
1I am going to use the DNS Challange method, and zone info is served by CloudFlare DNS. I am going to use certbot-dns-cloudflare plugin. For this purpose I need an API Key to allow certbot edit my DNS zone. Here are the steps for that:
2 Once the key is generated, you can test it with curl
And you will get a json similar to this one
3Put the token into cloudflare.ini file
4Run Certbot Container. The below command will mount your local folders inside container, so that your cloudflare.ini file will be accessible, and generated certificate will be also saved.
5Follow on screen prompts
6Find your certificates under /etc/letsencrypt/live/codeharmony.net/ folder.
7Add your certificates to Load Balancer or Certificate Service. Or whereever you manage your certificates.
8Edit your HTTPS listener to use new certificate, either loadbalancer or your http server.
I recently shared my latest side project with you all here . It's a simple web page where I've been experimenting with various tools, and my latest addition focuses on AI. Lately, I've been diving deep into the realms of AI, machine learning, and data science, exploring the tools and libraries that are making waves in the tech world. Like many, I'm captivated by the possibilities offered by transformers and LLMs, and I'm eager to integrate them into real-world applications to tackle previously unsolvable problems. We have new tools now, let's see what has changed.
Of course, mastering these technologies doesn't happen overnight. I'm dedicating time to different projects, using them as opportunities to learn, experiment, and refine my skills. In my last blog post , I discussed automating invoice entry, or perhaps "assisting" is a better term. The goal was to extract values from documents and streamline data entry, ultimately making life a little easier and saving time.
This time around, I'm delving into LLMs with a focus on summarization. I've developed and deployed a tool capable of summarizing content from YouTube videos, PDF files, or any web page. The concept is straightforward: extract the text and condense it down. To streamline the process, I'm leveraging 🦜️🔗 LangChain under the hood, which simplifies the task. Here's a glimpse into some of the tools and APIs I've utilized:
1 For YouTube transcript extraction, I've tapped into the youtube-transcript-api , allowing users to download transcripts if available. Transcript can be uploaded by the user or auto-generated, and it can be in multiple languages, and it can be translated to other langueages as well. All this can happen on the fly. Transcribing the auido/video yourself is also an option, there are a lot of models trained for this purpose paid like Oracle AI Speech and open source like Whisper from OpenAI, and many more...
2 Processing PDF documents has been an enjoyable challenge. I was already experimenting extensively with PyMuPDF and now PyPDFLoader . One thing I like about python world is there are hundreds of libraries out there, you can find a huge list of document loaders here .
3 Web page processing required leveraging AsyncHtmlLoader and Html2TextTransformer and beautiful soup to sift through the HTML and focus solely on the textual content.
4 Summarization duties are handled by LLMs (such as OpenAI and Cohere), albeit with a limited context window. If the text fits into LLM context it is great, if not then to work around this, I've implemented a technique called "MapReduce ," chunking the text into manageable pieces for summarization, then condensing those summaries further. This might not be required at all in the near future, competition is tough and everyday we witness increasing model parameters and context windows .
5 I've added a few user-friendly features, such as automatically fetching and displaying thumbnails for pasted links. Whether it's a YouTube video, PDF file, or web page, users will see a visual preview to enhance their experience. YouTube offers thumnails if you know the video_id, which part of of the URL. For PDF files I've created a thumbnail image of the first page. Web pages were a bit tricky, I used headless chromium to get screenshot of the page. This Dockerfile was extremely helpful to achieve this.
6 To keep users engaged while awaiting results, I've enabled streaming via web sockets using socket.io for both console logs and chain responses. Although it does come with a cost, it is highly motivating for user to keep waiting as witnessing things happen under the hood. And with ChatGPT, it kind of became the defacto.
7 And finally everything is nicely packed in a container and deployed on Oracle Cloud behind load balancers secured with TLS/SSL and CloudFlare etc. You can read about the setup here .
As always, I've shared all the code on my GitHub repository , along with the references that aided me at the bottom of this post. I'll also be putting together a quick demo to showcase these features in action. While these concepts may seem generic, practice truly does refine them. Implementing these tools has not only boosted my confidence but also honed my skills for future challanges.
Conclusion
I hope this project serves as inspiration for readers, sparking ideas for solving their own challenges. Perhaps it could fit into any requirement that needs simplifying the review and categorization of lengthy text. Documents like Market Research Reports, Legal Documents, Financial Reports, Training and Educational Materials, Meeting Minutes and Transcripts, Content Curation for your Social Media and even Competitive Intelligence Gathering...
All we need is a little creativity, and courage to tackle our old unsolvable problems with our new tools. Langchain itself is using this to improve documentation quality combined with clustering/classification logic.
If you have any ideas or questions, feel free to discuss them in the comments. Don't hesitate to reach out; together, we might just find the solution you're looking for.
Since couple of years, almost everyone is talking about AI, trying to understand how this can help, both life and business. OpenAI ChatGPT made a huge impact in our lives, "You are a helpful assistant", thank you! I am using it daily. I have been also playing around with other language models like Llama 2 and actively learning ML from different resources. Hugging Face is a must join platform along with all the material on LangChain . Just these two got me as far as I could train and run my own model to classify my emails within a week, and the results were incredibly better than I could ever expect. Besides I am enjoying this a lot.
Nowadays the number of interested customers is increasing and this post is about a very basic customer use-case, a real one: invoice entry. I know, it doesn't sound interesting, at first I thought my technical consultancy for ERP days are over, but I promise this is not boring. It has new challanges for me (and for most customers) and demonstrates application of AI services to real life problems. So let's dive into it!
Requirements
"...investigating the possibilities of automating / optimizing the reading and processing of PDF documents with the help of Optical Character Recognition (OCR)..."
The moment I saw this I could imagine what they wanted. After verifying their ideal soution in our discovery meeting, we planned for a demo to proove it can work.
Here is a mock design, on the right side we display the PDF file, OCR'ed and all values extracted, and on the left side form is populated with the extracted values. Ideally operator will just click save, and will have a chance to fill in any missing information, huge time saving.
Challenges
Biggest challange is lack of skills, customer knows APEX inside out but I am not an APEX developer. I understand the APEX environment, components and how they work, installed and configured many times. Followed and demonstrated many workshops, but never developed something from scratch. Yet APEX is low code, there are many samples and I was able to complete this in 2 days.
Development
I will briefly mention the steps I've followed and highlight the important parts. Using cloud services makes it easy to start. 1 I start with creating an Autonomous database and APEX workspace. It takes minutes to start worrking on my APEX development.
2 Then I follow this LiveLab workshop as a starter application. I tweaked the table structure according to my needs, but it gave me the foundation I needed for interacting OCI Document Understanding service using object storage is a good decision.
3 Using Document Understanding service inside APEX was easy.
I have added API endpoint in application definition.
Then I made changes to saveDocument process to invoke the AI service after uploading file to Object Storage. The below code prepares the JSON body, invokes the service processorJobs, parses return message and updates the table. The execution flow and response time is not efficient for production but good enough for a POC. I am using only Key Value Extraction feature, but you can also use all features including generation of a searchable PDF file in your output bucket. The service is pretrained and capable of identifying common key/value pairs from an invoice document. My service call creates a json file, which can be located with the job_id. I've also loaded that json file into a blob, parsed and created views on top of it just to make my life a bit easier. Chris Saxon has an excellent cheat sheat for that purpose.
4 I created a new page, with 3 regions. Two side by side, left for showing/entering extracted values, right an iframe to display PDF file, last for invoice lines, as designed in the mock wireframe.
For displaying PDF inline on the right side of the page I followed instructions in this YouTube video . The only thing is I didn't have a link item on the same page, but the ID has to come as a page parameter. So I added the link on my home page where all uploaded files are listed, and passed the document_id as page parameter. Then created a new Page Load Dynamic Action to get ID and trigger PDFViewer Action to display the file.
After changing the theme to Redwood (with some modifications to make it dark) the application looks like this:
Conclusion
APEX and AI Services is a very powerful combination, that can help you boost the productivity. Please share your ideas about what you think and of course new use-cases in the comments, maybe we can build one together!
Hello everyone! It's been a while since I last shared my thoughts, but I've been deep in the trenches of a fascinating new stuff. You know how things are, it started with a simple need for a mock API server and led me through setting up load balancers, domain management, and fun with Mandelbrot sets. Let me take you through it. This can be used as a blueprint for deploying your web workload securely on modern cloud environments.
Setting the Stage with a Python Flask App
Normally a quick dirty python http.server is enough for testing accessibility but this one time we needed a bit more than that. It all began with a customer request that they needed to setup a mock API server. A Python Flask app seemed to be a suitable option for that time: I've never used it before. I must admit curiosity and growing pythonic love inside me made me do this choice. This initial step, though seemingly straightforward, laid the groundwork for the exciting challenges that followed. There are lots of tutorials to get you started, just start with this link.
Load Balancers, Domains, and the Birth of CodeHarmony.Net
I was just playing around with my new Flask app, discovering blueprints , jinja templates etc., you know usual things. Then another customer came with a fair request:
I want to use my load balancer with multiple backends accessible via different domains and subdomains.
Which is possible with Virtual Hostnames . Start with adding your hostnames (actual DNS A Records).
Then you need to decide if
you want to use one listener for each backendset (which implies each listener will be using a different port) e.g. codeharmony.net:443, files.codeharmony.net:444, etc... Straightforward if you are okay with different ports. Just select the hostname(s) during listener creation.
you want to use one listener for all backendsets (which implies you should be able to distinguish by the requested URI). This one a little tricky and requires proper planning. You need to combine hostnames and path route sets. Here is the official documentation
For testing this in my tenancy I needed a domain, well, mmm... Maybe not, I could just edit my host file but to be honest I wanted to also test deploying my Flask app and see it live instead of scraping it. This prompted the creation of CodeHarmony.Net . I followed the hype, and the name born out of collaboration with ChatGPT. With a smooth purchase from Namecheap , CodeHarmony became the hub for my tech experiments
Navigating the Cloud with Cloudflare and SSL/TLS Encryption
You know, these are the basic steps to ensure a secure and efficient web deployment.
I created a free Cloudflare account, with basic protection to proxy connections to my loadbalancer as I don't want them to be exposed to all internet directly.
Then I updated nameservers on my domain name provider (Namecheap) with the ones CloudFlare provided.
Then created domain and subdomains (A Records) using my Load Balancer Public IP
Then proxied the connection to load balancer. I implemented full strict SSL/TLS encryption, terminating at the load balancer (which means private subnet traffic is not encrypted)
On load balancer end, configured listeners for both HTTP and HTTPS. I mentioned a little about routing above.
To make sure all traffic is supported and encrypted I also created an HTTP listener and redirected all HTTP to HTTPS using URL Redirect Rules
Cloudflare brings it own TLS certificates which is very cool. For my loadbalancer HTTPS Listener I used a free Let's Encrypt certificate.
I restricted access to my loadbalancer to CloudFlare IP addresses (I am not sure if I whitelisted all of them though...). One cool thing I noticed while investigating loadbalancer access logs, CloudFlare sends end client IP address in forwardedForAddr field. Here is a simplified access log:
Flask Web App Deployed on Container Instances as Backend
For those who share my passion for coding adventures, all code is available on my Github repo . Dive in, explore, and feel free to contribute. Dockerfile is also included as it is packaged as a container. You will also find a build-and-deploy.sh file which is building the container image, pushing it to a private OCI registry then creating container instance. You need to prepare .env file which is not included in the repo, the file should contain following values:
Once set you should be able to build and deploy your application. Just notice that I am using London region, if you use another remember to change values including OCI Registry.
It was super fun to design, code, build and deploy everything with the best practices applied. It felt good when put myself to test and find out that I can still code Full Stack with a basic Python/Flask backend with Bootstrap and JQuery for the frontend. I was a bit rusty in the begining but progressed very fast. Admittedly, React or Vue might have been the trendy choices, but the experience proved invaluable, reigniting my confidence in full-stack development.
You will find many scripts converted into tools in these pages: manipulating PDF files, playing around with images. Captivating world of Mandelbrot sets which is a beauty of drawing, painting, and exploring color palettes became my newfound fascination, leading to the discovery of hidden gems waiting to be unveiled.
Curious about the technical details? Check out the final topology:
Until next time, keep coding, stay curious, and embrace the ever-evolving tech landscape.
