jolira-deployer

The deployer is a very simple tool for automatically deploying applications when launching a new virtual machine on systems such as EC2 or OpenStack.

You may want to also look at systems such as Ubuntu's Juju. Juju is a much more comprehensive solution than the deployer.

The basic idea is that applications and the OS are mainted and deployed separately (potentially by different teams). The OS is kept using AMI that represents "Golden Image". When the AMI is launched configuration information is passed as "user-data". This configuration information identifies the application manifest that defines what application should be deployed and how it should be launched.

The deployer takes care of installing the application and launches it.

Installation

Start with an AMI from a trusted source such as Ubuntu's Cloud Images. The deployer has been tested with Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 12.10, but should run without any problems on any OS that is supported by node.js.

Launch an instance, download the config.sh, and run the script a root.

The config.sh script will install node.js, npm, the build essentials, and a number of other dependencies. It will also install an Upstart script that automatically launches the deployer at startup.

The config.sh script will also create a new user called deployer. In order to be able to be able to use be able to provision applications from github, you will have to create a key and add it to a github user that can access your source code.

sudo su - deployer
ssh-keygen
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

You will also have to install all OS dependencies your application may require, as npm does not manage these types of components.

My applications are connected using zero-conf and require the following component to be installed.

sudo apt-get install libavahi-compat-libdnssd-dev

After the AMI the instance is configured accordingly, create an AMI.

Usage

In order to use the deployer, one has to create a manifest that defines where to get the application (currently only git sources are supported), the environment variables that have to be defined to run the application and the command line to be used to start the application. Here is an example for a manifest file:

{
    "repository":"git@github.com:jolira/myapp.git",
    "env": {
        "NODE_ENV": "production"
    },
    "command":{
        "cmd":"./node_modules/site-manager/bin/site-manager",
        "args":[
            "--watch-dirs=false",
            "."
        ]
    }
}

The manifest can be stored in an S3-bucket, on an http-server or on the local file-system.

When launching an instance of the AMI that contains the deployer, one has to pass enough information for the deployer to be able to find the manifest file, such as in:

{
    "aws-access-key-id": "AKKAJKRUL44GH2U7AP5Q",
    "aws-secret-access-key": "EVQKm+xVCjhwxjZOlOxxDpf+eBFSIaSK13Um0uFQ",
    "aws-log-bucket": "jolira-logs",
    "aws-region": "us-west-2",
    "manifest": "s3://jolira-qa/config/myapp.json"
}

License

MIT License