Setting up the environment

Let's start by creating the folder in which we will place the application files. First, create a directory called notifier and go into that directory so we can create the virtual environment:

mkdir notifier && cd notifier

We create the virtual environment using pipenv:

pipenv --python ~/Installs/Python3.6/bin/python3.6

Remember that if Python 3 is in our path, you can simply call:

pipenv --three

To build this service we are going to use the micro web framework Flask, so let's install that:

pipenv install flask

We are also going to install the requests package, which will be used when sending requests to the order service:

pipenv install requests

That should be everything we need for now. Next, we are going to see how we can use AWS Simple Email Service to send emails from our applications.