HOVA

From the school of hard knocks.

Release go applications as binaries & node apps as tar's bundled with all their requirements to a specified S3 bucket with Docker.

Setup

Install Docker

First things first, you need to install Docker on your local machine.

If you are on a Mac, you can refer to this guide for installing Docker & boot2docker.

If you are on any other OS, you should checkout the Docker Installation Docs for installing on your system.

env_vars

You must create an enviornment variables file named env_vars. This allows us to give the docker container your AWS credentials, etc.

Here is a sample env_vars file:

AWS_S3_BUCKET=jesss/dist
AWS_ACCESS_KEY=YOUR_ACCESS_KEY
AWS_SECRET_KEY=YOUR_SECRET_KEY
GPG_PASSPHRASE=somepasswordforgpg

You must have all the variables above defined.

If your id_rsa file has a passphrase you also need to set the KEY_PASSPHRASE enviornment variable in the env_vars file.

Build the yhat/hova image

There is a Dockerfile & a Makefile in this directory. Before releasing any apps you need to build the yhat/hova docker image. You can see what images you have by running docker images.

To build the yhat/hova image, run:

$ make

Note: You only need to run this once, unless you make changes to release/make.sh. It will take a few minutes the first time, but any changes after that will be built from cache. The base image has s3cmd, go, node, npm, grunt, bower, etc. Everything you need to compile a go app or a node app.

Release a Node app or Go app

Note: If you are using the release command for a go app, it will not be cross compiled and expects you to have a Makefile in the repo for building the app. You can also include an optional Goopfile with line delimited requirements. If you want cross compilation of binaries see the cross compiling binaries section.

Running make release will release an app. You MUST pass a variable REPO to the command. For example,

# release the master branch of a repo
$ make release REPO=git@bitbucket.org:jfrazelle/gifs.jessfraz.com.git
# the end result will be uploaded to your bucket at
# s3://${AWS_S3_BUCKET}/jfrazelle/gifs.jessfraz.com/master/latest.tar.gz and
# s3://${AWS_S3_BUCKET}/jfrazelle/gifs.jessfraz.com/master/${TIMESTAMP}.tar.gz

# release a different branch of a repo
$ make release REPO=git@bitbucket.org:jfrazelle/gifs.jessfraz.com.git BRANCH=dev
# the end result will be uploaded to your bucket at
# s3://${AWS_S3_BUCKET}/jfrazelle/gifs.jessfraz.com/dev/latest.tar.gz and
# s3://${AWS_S3_BUCKET}/jfrazelle/gifs.jessfraz.com/dev/${TIMESTAMP}.tar.gz

The end result from the release, is uploaded to your S3 bucket that you gave in the env_vars file in the following directory formats:

s3://${AWS_S3_BUCKET}/${REPO_OWNER}/${REPO_NAME}/${BRANCH}/latest.tar.gz
s3://${AWS_S3_BUCKET}/${REPO_OWNER}/${REPO_NAME}/${BRANCH}/${TIMESTAMP}.tar.gz

Okay so now I have a tar...

You can run it in a Docker container! What? Yessss!

Below is a sample Docker file to use with your tarred node app.

FROM node:latest

COPY latest.tar.gz /

RUN mkdir -p /src; tar -C /src -zxf latest.tar.gz
RUN mv /src/* /src/app


WORKDIR /src/app

# set the vars
ENV PORT 8888
ENV NODE_ENV production
EXPOSE 8888

# replace this with your main "server" script file
CMD [ "node", "app.js" ]

In a directory with the above Dockerfile & your tar you can run docker build --rm -t your/image_name . to build the Docker image.

Then to run your app it's as simple as docker run -d --name your_app_name -p 8888 -e=ANY_ENV_VAR="val" your/image_name.

Happy deploying!!

Release Cross Compiled Go Binaries

Running make binary-release will release go binaries. You MUST pass a variable SRC to the command. For example,

# release the master branch of a repo
$ make binary-release SRC=github.com/jfrazelle/weather
# the end result will be uploaded to your bucket at
# s3://${AWS_S3_BUCKET}/jfrazelle/weather/Linux/386/weather
# ...
# and so and so forth for the rest of the OS & ARCH options

The end result from the release, is uploaded to your S3 bucket that you gave in the env_vars file in the following directory formats:

s3://${AWS_S3_BUCKET}/${NAME}/${OS}/${ARCH}/${binary_name}
s3://${AWS_S3_BUCKET}/${NAME}/${OS}/${ARCH}/latest.tar.gz
s3://${AWS_S3_BUCKET}/${NAME}/${OS}/${ARCH}/${TIMESTAMP}.tar.gz

Special thanks to Docker's own build scripts for giving me this idea.