Working of One Click Deployment Buttons in loklak

Today’s topic is deployment. It’s called one-click deployment for a reason: Developers are lazy. It’s hard to do less than clicking on one button, so that’s our goal to make use of one click button in loklak.

For one click buttons we only need a central build server, which is our loklak_server. Everything written here was based on Apache ant, but later on ant build was deprecated and loklak server started to use gradle build. We wanted to make the process of provisioning and setting up a complete infrastructure of your own, from server to continuous integration tasks, as easy as possible. These button allows you to do all of that in one click.

How does it work?

You can see the one click buttons in the README page of loklak_server repository.

These repositories may include a different files like scalingo.json for scalingo, docker-compose.yml and docker-cloud.yml for docker cloud etc files at their root, allowing them to define a few things like a name, description, logo and build environment (Gradle build in the case of loklak server). Once you’ve clicked on any of the buttons, you will be redirected to respective apps and prompted with this information for you to review before confirming the fork.

This will effectively fork the repository in your account. Once the repo is ready, you can click on it. You will then be asked to “activate” or “deploy” your branch, allowing it to provision actual servers and run tasks. At the same time, you will be asked to review and potentially modify a few variables that were defined in the predefined files (for eg: app.json for heroku) of the apps. These are usually things like the Git URL of the repo for loklak, or some of the details related to the cloud provider you want to use (eg: Digital Ocean).

Once you confirmed this last step, your branch i.e., most probably master branch of loklak server repo is activated and the button will start provisioning and configuring your servers, along with the tasks which may allow you to build and deploy your app. In most of the cases, you can go to the tasks/setup section and run the build task that will fetch loklak server’s code, build it and deploy it on your server, all configurations included and will get a public IP.

What’s next

In loklak we are also introducing new one click “AZURE” button, then the users can also start deploying loklak in azure platform.

Resources

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One Click Deployment Button for loklak Using Heroku with Gradle Build

The one click deploy button makes it easy for the users of loklak to get their own cloud instance created and deployed in their heroku account and can be used according to their flexibility. Heroku uses an app.json manifest in the code repo to figure out what add-ons, config and other deployment steps are required to make the code run. This is used to configure and deploy the app.

Once you have provide the app name and then click on deploy button, Heroku will start deploying the loklak server to a new app on your account:

When setup is complete, you can open the deployed app in your browser or inspect it in Dashboard.

All these steps and requirements can now be encoded in an app.json file and placed in a repo alongside a button that kicks off the setup with a single click.

App.json is a manifest format for describing apps and specifying what their config requirements are. Heroku uses this file to figure out how code in a particular repo should be deployed on the platform. Here is the loklak’s app.json file which used gradle build pack:

{
	"name": "Loklak Server",
	"description": "Distributed Tweet Search Server",
	"logo": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/loklak/loklak_server/master/html/images/loklak_anonymous.png",
	"website": "http://api.loklak.org",
	"repository": "https://github.com/loklak/loklak_server.git",
	"image": "loklak/loklak_server:latest-master",
	"env": {
		"BUILDPACK_URL": "https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-gradle.git"
	}
}

 

If you are interested you can try deploying the peer from here itself. Checkout how simple it can be to deploy.

Deploy button:

Deploy

Resources:

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