Wacky-Crackups

Local Development

Installation

Requirements:

• Node, NPM
• Git

Optionally:

• Docker

Steps:

1. Clone repo: git clone https://github.com/parrotmac/wacky-crackups.git
2. Change Directory: cd wacky-crackups
3. Configure a .env file for config settings (see below)
4. Install: npm install
5. Run: npm start
6. Visit: http://localhost:3000

Hints

• Have something else running on port 3000? Use PORT=3030 npm start to specify 3030 as an alternate port

.env/Dotenv Configuration

The server can be configured with a few different settings using environmental variables. While it's possible to configure them on your machine or define them when running (as shown for PORT above), this project supports an easier way.

Steps:

1. Create .env file in the root of the project directory
2. Fill with your environmental variables, in the format/example shown below
3. Save & Profit!

PORT=3030
BLOG_API_URL=http://blog.wackycrackups.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts
FEEDBACK_EMAIL_URL=https://formspree.io/<FEEDBACK DESTINATION EMAIL GOES HERE>

When running npm start this will make the application start on port 3030 instead of 3000, and use the current Wordpress installation as the blog data source.

Note: This file is set to be ignored by Git since different people might want it configured in different ways. Please don't track this file.

Deployment

Overview

This is a list of the services that are currently in use. It would be a good idea to migrate all of this to AWS-Managed or commercial services as time and need permit. Commercial (paid) alternatives are available as drop-in replacements for every part, meaning migration can be done piece-by-piece or alltogether.

• Origin Repo: https://github.com/parrotmac/wacky-crackups.git
• Builds: "Little Blue" container builder https://lb.stag9.com
• Registry: "Thing Registry" container registry https://thingregistry.com/
• Deployments: Deployed to ec2-54-173-112-51.compute-1.amazonaws.com
• Run: Run as Docker container in a Docker-Compose setup
• DNS: Route9 via Story Startups AWS Console

Push

On push to origin repo, a build is triggered. LittleBlue currently doesn't show very much information about the build process. If there's a probelem with the code it may fail to build. After build it pushed to the Docker registry at thingregistry.com/parrotmac-wacky-crackups.

Pull

To pull from thingregistry.com/parrotmac-wacky-crackups you will need to login. The user is registryuser. Contact me (@parrotmac) if you'd like the passsword.

Connect

To connect to the production server. The server is running Amazon Linux on an EC2 instance. The genral connection procedure is outlined here: Connecting to Your Linux Instance Using SSH, but the important stuff is laid out below:

• Generate an SSH key pair (On macOS or Linux you can use ssh-keygen, on Windows use PuTTY's SSH-Keygen utility)
• Add your public key (typically ends in .pub, something like id_rsa.pub) to the server. If you don't have access, anyone with access can add your key.
• Connect with ssh -i /path/to/your/ssh-key-pair.pem ec2-user@ec2-54-173-112-51.compute-1.amazonaws.com
  • Note: You might not need to specify the path using -i <your path> if you saved it to the default location as your default key (usually something like ~/.ssh/)

Redeploy

Once connected to the server via SSH, run ls and you'll see two directories: nginx-proxy and wackycrackups.com.

• The nginx-proxy is part of the infrastructure. It contains the docker-compose.yml and related files that enable multiple server host names, automatic SSL, and other web-facing server settings.
• The wackycrackups.com directory contains the docker-compose.yml defining how the Docker image (built in previous steps) is run.

Web Server docker-compose.yml

Below is an example (with comments!) of the docker-compose.yml used to run Wacky Crackups.

version: '2'    # Version '3' is available, but doesn't provide any benefits for this particular config
services:       # Multiple services can be run together
  wackyweb:     # This is the only service we're using right now
    image: thingregistry.com/parrotmac-wacky-crackups       # The name of the Docker image to run
    restart: always     # Docker will restart the container if it crashes
    expose:             # This is the port we're running Node on -- must be exposed to be accessable outside the container
      - "3000"
    environment:        # List of environmental variables
      - BLOG_API_URL=http://blog.wackycrackups.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts
      - FEEDBACK_EMAIL_URL=<See Other Documentation>

      # These are specific to the way the server is setup right now.
      # VIRTUAL_HOST defines what domain names this should be accessable at
      # LETSENCRYPT variables are for automatic SSL, EMAIL is where alerts are routed
      - VIRTUAL_HOST=wackycrackups.com,www.wackycrackups.com
      - LETSENCRYPT_HOST=wackycrackups.com,www.wackycrackups.com
      - LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL=isaac@sianware.com
    container_name: wacky-website       # Name of container while running
    networks:           # This and the rest of the file are all for hooking into the `nginx-proxy` service
      - wacky-proxy

networks:
  wacky-proxy:
    external:
      name: nginx-proxy