GraphQL Presentation Hub

This repo is used for preparing the production environment of GraphQL presentation app (Check out the presentation!). For local development environment, this repo can be ignored.

In short:

• Instructions here can be followed to set up the system for the first time.
• CI/CD pipeline of the app is handled by Travis (separately for React-Apollo and Node-GraphQL).
• However, changes made here, in this repo, should be manually pulled to production.
• Docker compose and nginx configs and deploy scripts that Travis uses live here.
• Docker compose is used for getting the app up and running in production
• There are 2 nginx configs. One for SSL + http/2 connection, one for http/1.1.

How to deploy for the first time

The workflow is designed with the idea of using a DigitalOcean droplet that has docker pre-installed in it.

ssh into your server, and then do the following:

# Let's create the app folder
mkdir app

# Go to the folder
cd app

# Run this executable to quickly clone the necessary repositories into
# appropriate folders
./clone

# Create necessary .env files
echo "REACT_APP_GRAPHQL_API_URL=<API_URL>" > ./react-apollo/.env.production
echo "API_BASE_URL=<CHARGING_STATIONS_REST_API_URL>" > ./node-graphql/.env

# Get the system up and running
# Docker should start in detached mode, so you can use the session for other things.
# App should be accessible through http on the IP once the system is up and running.
docker-compose up -d

Nice to know docker commands

These commands helped me to understand better what's happening inside containers:

# Check logs of a container:
docker logs <container-id> --follow

# Run a command within a container:
docker exec <container-id> <command>

# When you want to remove everything unused, to open up some disk space
# This can be dangerous, as it will remove volumes too.
docker system prune -af

Configuring domains and obtaining SSL certificates

By default, the project is configured to deploy a non-secure http/1.1 nginx. When you decide to switch to a secure connection (with a domain name), make sure you have these:

• A domain
• DNS lookups pointed on the registrar side to cloud provider's name servers.
• Necessary A and CNAME records added on the cloud provider side.

Firstly, you would need to replace occurences of chargin.cf and www.chargin.cf in nginx configs and docker-compose.yml with your own domain name.

Once you're good to go, ssh into the server and do the following:

# Change to app directory
cd app

# Switch to using nginx config for SSL connection.
# It should print:
# "Now using nginx.conf for https/2".
# "Now using docker-compose.yml for https/2".
./use-ssl

# Create folder for storing Diffie-Hellman parameters (used for obtaining SSL certificates)
mkdir dhparam

# Generate key
sudo openssl dhparam -out /root/app/dhparam/dhparam-2048.pem 2048

# Get the whole setup up and running
docker-compose up -d --build

# Check if certbot successfully obtained the certificates
docker logs <certbot-container-id>

# If so, we don't need to run certbot (and send renewal request on every deploy)
# from now on (until renewal time). So, comment-out the certbot-related parts in
# docker-compose.yml (Put # character before lines in certbot block).
vim docker-compose.yml

# That's it! If everything went as planned, our service now should be accessible
# via https/2.

# TODO: Handle automatic certificate renewal.