Deployment

Like the backend, this project uses a Fabric script for automating deployment actions. Once fabric is installed you can view the various deployment-related tasks with:

fab -l

The script assumes that you have ssh aliases for the following servers:

  • prod = ehriprod

  • stage = ehristage

  • test = ehritest

Once the project has been built (using play clean stage) it can be deployed with:

fab prod deploy

Alternatively you can just do fab prod clean_deploy to clean/build and deploy in one go. Currently the available commands are:

One the server the app is run from within /opt/webapps/docview. Within that dir there is a symlink called target which points to the current version with the deploys directory. A version is named with the current Git hash appended with the date. The contents of each deploy directory is the target directory that sbt creates.

Setting the portal to read-only mode

There is a configuration value ehri.readonly.file which points to a file path. The portal checks on each request that this path a) exists, and b) is a plain file. If both those conditions are true the portal will prevent people logging in, which also prevents modifications to the database. In the prod config, this file is /opt/webapps/docview/READONLY.

READONLY mode can be toggled on and off from the Fabric like so:

fab prod readonly

This simply touches or deletes /opt/webapps/docview/READONLY, depending on whether it exists.

Setting the portal to maintenance mode

Maintenance mode simply serves 503 service unavailable to everyone, but in a prettier manner than shutting down the server. It can be enabled by touching /opt/webapps/docview/MAINTENANCE on the server or using the Fabric command:

fab prod maintenance

Serving a message on all pages

For messages like "The site will be down for maintenance in 1 hour" create a file called /opt/webapps/docview/MESSAGE containing the message text, or use the Fabric command:

fab prod message:"This is some message text"

Run the command without a message to disable.

Serving 503 to everyone except specific IP addresses

If you want to conduct maintenance on the site without other people interfering, an IP whitelist can be enabled by creating a file /opt/webapps/docview/IP_WHITELIST containing the allowed IPs one per line. For single IPs the Fabric command can be used:

fab prod whitelist:123.123.123.123

Note: this system is pretty stupid and doesn't handle IP ranges or anything.