convox-circle

Demo of using Convox on CircleCI: https://circleci.com/gh/jordansexton/convox-circle

Originally inspired by Continuous Deployment with CircleCI and Convox.

Explanation

This demo project is a set of shell scripts and CircleCI configuration that enables running convox start as a background process on CircleCI, and executing tests inside the app Docker container it brings up.

This is useful for allowing your test environment to closely model your deployment environment. The demo tests a simple Node HTTP server with linked Postgres and Redis containers.

Notes

• This requires CircleCI's Ubuntu 14.04 environment for Docker 1.9 support which is required by Convox. Set this at https://circleci.com/gh/<GITHUB_ORG>/<GITHUB_REPO>/edit#build-environment
• The environment may have MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and/or Redis running. stop-services.sh is run to kill them because of port conflicts.
• CircleCI has a special convention for background processes. start.sh is run in the background in this fashion, and wait-for-start.sh echos its output until the app Docker container is up.
• docker exec doesn't work on CircleCI. lint.sh and test.sh have to use lxc-attach to run in the app Docker container.
• Since environment variables don't seem to be preserved by lxc-attach in the same way as docker exec, export-docker-env.sh is used to pull them into the Docker host's environment so they can be propagated.
• There is also deploy.sh for automating the deployment after your tests pass based on @matthewford's article. This is configured to only run on the deploy branch.
• circle.yml is configured to export the logs for all meaningful steps as artifacts.

Caveats

This involved some shell scripting and some manipulation of Docker containers and I'm not very good at either.

There are probably smarter, more performant, and more idiomatic ways to do everything I'm doing.

Please tell me what they are or submit a pull request!

Local setup

git clone https://github.com/jordansexton/convox-circle.git
cd convox-circle
cp .env.example .env
chmod +x convox-test.sh
./convox-test.sh

CircleCI setup

1. Go to https://console.convox.com/grid/user/profile
2. Copy your Convox account API key
3. Go to https://circleci.com/gh/<GITHUB_ORG>/<GITHUB_REPO>/edit#env-vars
4. Create some environment variables: - CONVOX_APP=<YOUR CONVOX APP NAME> (e.g. api) - CONVOX_ORG=<YOUR CONVOX ORG NAME> (e.g. acme) - CONVOX_PASSWORD=<YOUR CONVOX API KEY> (e.g. 45f2cb79-a941-4758-ab53-056574d75216) - CONVOX_RACK=<YOUR CONVOX RACK NAME> (e.g. production)