I'm currently working on a live project. The frontend part of the system is in ReactJS. We are using create-react-app as the starter kit.
We are facing some issues in deploying the application on live server. Earlier we followed the strategy of pushing the code on server and then creating the build on it. But we noticed that so long the build was generating, our site became unavailable. Which does not seem right. Hence we decide to create build folder in developer's local machine and push the build to the server. But now we are receiving a lot of change requests and feature requests, hence I'm planning to move to a robust git branching model. I believe this will create problem with the way we are currently handling our deployment strategy(which is to move the build to production).
It will be really helpful if some one can show us the right direction in handling deployment of ReactJS apps.
You can use Jenkins which can be configured to trigger the build as soon as a code in a branch is checked-in in GIT. I have not worked on Jenkins but surely, I have seen people using Jenkins for such things.
Jenkins will trigger the build in its own environment (or you can create a temp folder for the time being the build is getting generated if Jenkins operates on the server directly) which will generate the output bundle. So your code will not be removed from the server for that while and you can patch your new files to the actual folder (which can also be automated using Jenkins).
Related
My use case is composed of several ReactJs projects, where we collaborate using Git.
we are building a workflow to be used using Git, and that's our current thinking:
Each programmer works locally feching the next branch
They build their own branches but at the end its all merged to next
When all the pending tasks are done, we move create a branch test from next
Once test is fine, it is branched to beta
When stable, branched stable
This is the development phase.
For deployment, our first tought is to "build" the bundle on test, beta and stabe and copy it to the respective servers for running, as we keep built bundles on a normal filesystem (this is how we do it today, keep several bundles for several versions, not using Git)
Our production environment has dozen of servers in different customers, and every time we need to update, we need to copy the respective bundle from the correct directory to the server and install it (all bundles are build with an installation tool).
So, I have 2 doubts here:
a) Is the development workflow a good practice? Any suggestion?
b) How we make the deployment workflow smoother? Should we keep the bundles together in the code on Git ? Should we use something different?
Ideally we would need the server to autoupdate from our command. What would be the correct way to accomplish that ?
What is the best way to dynamically provide configuration to a vespa application?
It seems that the only method that is talked about is baking configuration values into the application package but is there any way to provide configuration values outside of that? ie are there cli tools to update individual configuration values at runtime?
Are there any recommendations or best practices for managing configuration across different environments (ie production vs development) ? At Oath/VMG is configuration checked into source control or managed outside of that?
Typically all configuration changes are made by deploying an updated application package. As you suggest, this is usually done by a CI/CD setup which builds and deploys the application package from a git repository whenever that changes.
This way it is easy to ensure changes have been reviewed (before merge), track all changes that have been made and roll them back if necessary. It is also easy to verify that the same changes which have been deployed and tested (preferably by automated tests) in a development / test environment are the ones that are deployed to production - because the same application package is deployed through each of those environments in order.
It is however also possible to update files in a deployed application package and create a new session from this, which may be useful if your application package has some huge resources. See https://docs.vespa.ai/documentation/cloudconfig/deploy-rest-api-v2.html#use-case-modify
I tried many modules to deploy the changes from development to staging manually but didn't find the better way to deploy the changes either coding or database to the staging server automatically.
Is there anything for Drupal 7 by which I can push my changes from development to staging without any manual work? I want all database related configuration, codes etc to be pushed automatically on the live server.
Thanks
There are many ways you can automate your deployment. one of which we follow is as below:
Using third party services like platform or pantheon for deployment.
Using hook_update_N along with features and strongram modules for configuration management.
Using shell script for running custom commands after deployment.
Using jenkins for deployment automation.
Some other tools / services can be found here https://www.kelltontech.com/monkey-talk
I've run over only a few examples of how to do this and they didn't work for me. Mainly since i've only used an ant script to auto build jar files threw jenkins. Now though i need to build those files in jenkins then upload them to a 3rd party file site like sourceforge. This is both to save hard drive space on the server, since i don't own it, and to allow external downloads. Any help is welcome but no comments on the fact i don't know to much about ant scripts.
Also something related by a bit separate.The jar file i'm building depends on a another jar file with its own version. i also want to make a new folder each time it uploads with a different dependency version. This way the users that download this file can easily understand the main jar version it goes with while allowing me to upload 20+ sub builds.
There are several ways to upload files, so there are several kind of ant tasks to do the job.
For instance, if you want to upload to sourceforge, you can use the Ant task scp. But it seems also possible to upload there via FTP: so here is the task ftp.
Maybe you find some other service which requires you to upload via HTTP: ant-contrib have the post task.
I used to do publications as part of my ANT build logic, creating a special "publish" target that issued the scp or ftp command.Now I'm more inclined to leverage one of the publish over plugins for Jenkins.
The main reason for this shift is the management of access credentials. Using the ANT based approach I was forced to run my build on a Jenkins slave that was pre-configured with the correct SSH key to talk to the remote server. The Jenkins plugin manages private keys centrally and ensures all slaves are properly configured.
Finally if your build has dependencies on 3rd party jars, use a dependency manager like ivy to download them and include them in your project. It then becomes trivial to include their upload as part of your publish step.
Our team develops distributed winform apps. We use ClickOnce for deployment and are very pleased with it.
However, we've found the pain point with ClickOnce is in creating the deployments. We have the standard dev/test/production environments and need to be able to create deployments for each of these that install and update separate from one another. Also, we want control over what assemblies get deployed. Just because an assembly was compiled doesn't mean we want it deployed.
The obvious first choice for creating deployments is Visual Studio. However, VS really doesn't address the issues stated. The next in line is the SDK tool, Mage. Mage works OK but creating deployments is rather tedious and we don't want every developer having our code signing certificate and password.
What we ended up doing was rolling our own deployment app that uses the command line version of Mage to create the ClickOnce manifest files.
I'm satisfied with our current solution but is seems like there would be an industry-wide, accepted approach to this problem. Is there?
I would look at using msbuild. It has built in tasks for handling clickonce deployments. I included some references which will help you get started, if you want to go down this path. It is what I use and I have found it to fit my needs. With a good build process using msbuild, you should be able to accomplish squashing the pains you have felt.
Here is detailed post on how ClickOnce manifest generation works with MsBuild.
I've used nAnt to run the overall build strategy, but pass parameters into MSBuild to compile and create the deployment package.
Basically, nAnt calls into MSBuild for each environment you need to deploy to, and generates a separate deployment output for each. You end up with a folder and all ClickOnce files you need for every environment, which you can just copy out to the server.
This is how we handled multiple production environments as well -- we had separate instances of our application for the US, Canada, and Europe, so each build would end up creating nine deployments, three each for dev, qa, and prod.