Deploying the EBM

Quick deploy

Once you are set up, you can deploy a staging site by running from the root directory:

make deploy-staging

And the same for production with:

make deploy-production

Setting up

The deployment system uses Ansible, and the necessary scripts are in tools/ansible.

The Ansible deployment needs a built bin/electricbook binary on your local machine, but otherwise uses the files in your local git repo. So first ensure that ./build.sh (or make, which runs that script) has executed without error, and that you have committed any changes to your local repo (e.g. changes to the HTML files in public).

Then go to the tools/ansible directory:

1. Copy the hosts-example file to a file your own for deployment. E.g.

   cp hosts-example hosts-staging
   

   Do not commit this file to version control, because it contains confidential information. (It should be ignored already by .gitignore.)

2. Then edit hosts-staging with appropriate values. The file contains details on each required value. E.g.

   email_host=mail.electricbook.works
   

3. Then ensure that your server will work with Ansible. This usually means:

   1. You need a login on your server that can ssh without passwords (use ssh-copy-id to ensure you have passwordless login).
   2. Your user must have passwordless sudo on the remote server: echo "$USERNAME ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL" | sudo tee /etc/sudoers.d/$USERNAME
   3. Ensure you’ve got python and a few other items installed on the remote server: sudo apt-get install -y python

4. Now you can deploy to the remote server. To do this, either:

   • from the repo root, run make deploy-staging, or
   • from the tools/ansible directory, run ansible-playbook -i hosts-staging playbook-bookserver.yml.

5. Set up similarly for deploying to production by switching staging in the file names above for production.