Haskell stack, Yesod and Docker

The why

Over the break I’ve been working on a web app to replace a fairly old MS Access Database that I built for my Dad to use in 2009 (he has a mobile vet business).

This seemed like a good chance to try out Yesod, a web framework for Haskell. The Yesod philosophy is to leverage the Haskell type system wherever possible. For example, in the Hamlet templating language everything from generating URLs to including static files and generating forms is checked at compile time.

stack is a cross platform build tool for developing Haskell programs which (when combined with Stackage makes Haskell development much more enjoyable.

I’d recommend stack for any new Haskell project, and hopefully this post can point someone else in the right direction for a stack/Yesod/Docker project.

I built a very basic site with Yesod and stack locally on OS X, based off the yesod-postgres template ( stack new mysite yesod-postgres ). The yesod dev server makes this all very easy, just running stack exec -- yesod devel will keep Yesod running and recompiling the app whenever any changes are made.

Soon it was time to make the app available somewhere in order to start getting some feedback. At this stage, the most basic requirement for the hosting was that it be low cost. Digital Ocean came to mind (use this link for $10 credit), and I’m now using their one-click Docker droplet at USD $5 per month. This host can run both the Yesod frontend and the PostgreSQL database.

Binaries built locally on OS X won’t run on a Linux-based Digital Ocean droplet, and it was a bit early to spend $$ on something like Snap or Travis, so I needed a VM or container to run the build in.

The how

Set up

stack has support for Docker to run the build and package the application, but it isn’t currently supported when using boot2docker (see these issues), so I used a simple Vagrantfile to start up a beefy VM:

Vagrant . configure ( 2 ) do | config | config . vm . box = "puppetlabs/centos-6.6-64-nocm" config . vm . provider "virtualbox" do | vb | vb . memory = "4096" vb . cpus = 8 vb . customize [ "modifyvm" , :id , "--ioapic" , "on" ] end end

Centos 6.6 might seem like an odd choice for a development environment, but the Vagrant box was already on my laptop, so using it saved me the download time (bandwidth is a precious commodity in semi-rural Australia).

I didn’t bother setting up provisioning properly, but here are the commands that are needed to get stack working:

# Add FP Complete repo & install stack curl -sSL https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.fpcomplete.com/centos/6/fpco.repo | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/fpco.repo sudo yum -y install stack # Add EPEL repo and install Docker sudo rpm -iUvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm sudo yum -y install docker-io # stack requires the Docker client to be able to connect # to the daemon without root, so add vagrant user to dockerroot group sudo gpasswd -a ${ USER } dockerroot # At this point, you'll need to log out and back in for # the group change to take effect # Setup iptables to allow Docker links to work sudo iptables -t filter -A DOCKER -d 172.17.0.0/16 -i docker0 -j ACCEPT

Adding the vagrant user to dockerroot comes with all the usual security issues, but I’m not too worried about that here. There are some other suggestions in the stack documentation for how to handle this.

Running the build

So, stack and Docker are now both installed. Enabling stack’s Docker integration on the VM is as simple as modifying the ~/.stack/config file:

This gives the advantage of using Docker to run the builds on the VM, while not impacting the yesod devel workflow on OS X.

By default stack will use the fpco/stack-build repository to obtain an image to run the build in. This suits me, as there is also fpco/stack-run for running the binaries once they’re compiled. The build image includes everything that’s necessary for building the whole of Stackage, whereas stack-run is more trimmed down.

Running stack build kicked off the build in the Docker container, which completed successfully as all required dependencies (e.g. libpq and pg_config) were already in the image. Thanks to FP Complete for setting up these Docker containers for everyone to use!

Packaging Docker image

stack’s support for creating container images is a relatively recent addition, and currently isn’t covered well in the documentation. There is a reference to the image configuration section here, which was enough for my needs. After added the relevant bits, my stack.yml looks something like:

resolver : lts-3.20 packages : - ' .' extra-deps : [] flags : mysite : library-only : false dev : false extra-package-dbs : [] # This isn't required as it's set in the user config on the VM # docker: # enable: true image : container : name : mdjnewman/mysite base : fpco/stack-run add : config : /app/config static : /app/static

With that in place, running stack image container produced a Docker container ready to be pushed to Docker Hub:

[[email protected] vagrant]$ stack image container Sending build context to Docker daemon 34.25 MB Sending build context to Docker daemon Step 0 : FROM fpco/stack-run ---> db9b2a858ef5 Step 1 : ADD ./ / ---> e682c572d7ed Removing intermediate container 1ce35ed1ccea Successfully built e682c572d7ed

Running a regular docker push published the image to the registry.

Deploying to Digital Ocean

After all these steps, the final package was in Docker Hub and it was just a matter of running the following commands on the droplet, and the site was live:

docker run --name = postgres -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD = $( uuidgen ) -e POSTGRES_USER = postgres -d postgres:9.3 # Yes, I know UUIDs don't make the best passwords :) docker run \ -d \ -w /app \ --link postgres:postgres \ -p 3000:3000 \ mdjnewman/mysite \ /bin/bash -c 'PGHOST=$POSTGRES_PORT_5432_TCP_ADDR PGPASS=$POSTGRES_ENV_POSTGRES_PASSWORD /usr/local/bin/mysite'

The last command is running the Yesod server, with environment variables set to the values provided by Docker (see here for info about setting configuration variables in Yesod).

The results

I’m very happy with the Yesod workflow, and stack’s Docker integration makes deploying a lot easier as I don’t have to worry about what packages are in my build and test environments. Seems like a good compromise between manually copying files around and having a full CD pipeline.

Using stack build with a LTS resolver and an isolated container is also the holy grail of repeatable builds!

There is still a lot that would need to be done (improving security, backups, logging etc) before this was closer to a production environment, but it’s good enough as a development region.

This whole process (including writing this post) from having something that I wanted to deploy to being able to view the live site took less than a day, and I was learning a lot along the way. Deciding where was the best place to host the site and waiting for Docker to pull the fpco/stack-build image took up most of the time!