Automate deploying internal Mathesar

[mathemancer]

Problem

Currently, deploying changes to the develop branch to the internal.mathesar.org instance is a manual process. We want to do it often, and this is burdensome.

Proposed solution

We should automate this deployment.

Additional context

We'd like to use the docker setup to maintain parity with our current recommendations to users. The current deployment process is: Brent logs into internal.mathesar.org via SSH, looks in .bash_history to try to remember what he did last time, and then runs

cd mathesar  # Note that the repo is under /home/brent at the moment. Suboptimal.
git status  # Should be on develop branch. If not, switch to that branch.
git pull
sudo docker build -t mathesar/mathesar-prod:latest --build-arg PYTHON_REQUIREMENTS=requirements-prod.txt .
sudo docker compose -f /etc/mathesar/docker-compose.yml down
sudo docker compose -f /etc/mathesar/docker-compose.yml up

Clearly, there is room for improvement. The goal is to build a local image based on the develop branch, and then run Mathesar in 'prod mode', but using the local image rather than pulling the actual prod image from dockerhub. If tagged properly, this should be the result of the above commands.

Pushing develop builds

As part of this issue, we should also push develop Docker builds of Mathesar to Docker Hub regularly, since there are some users who may want to test it (see #2709 (comment)). This may involve setting up a new DockerHub repo or renaming our current DockerHub repo from mathesar-prod to mathesar.

[dmos62]

The instructions seem simple enough to not need automation. Maybe let's document this and call it a day?

Edit: I reread the top post and noticed that "we want to update internal.mathesar.org often"; what is "often"?

If it's no more often than once a week, I think doing it manually is fine. If it's more often (2-3 times a week), I'd want at least a shell script. A cronjob would be nice, but is develop stable enough for automatic updates?

[kgodey]

@dmos62 This issue is a result of discussion + a decision in Matrix yesterday, starting here. All your points were discussed there, but to summarize:

is develop stable enough for automatic update

This is for us (the core team) to dogfood develop and notice issues early. It may cause us some inconvenience if things break, but it's good for the product. Also, we have regular backups for the DB.

what is "often"?

Ideally every time something is merged into develop

[kgodey]

I added a section to the main description of the issue to also push develop Docker builds to DockerHub.

[notramo]

I would like to have DockerHub images too, because #2709 affects our project, and as the resolving of the issue progresses, we want to use the latest fixes in our docker-compose.yml as soon as possible.

[kgodey]

Adding user reported label to track @notramo's request.

[kgodey]

Since this is related to internal infrastructure and not Mathesar code, I've moved it to Basecamp here. We'll still be working on this.