2. Developing the magic

In the next few paragraphs, I’ll develop the core of my strategy which leverage Docker and DO droplets. Let’s dive right in.

Dockerize all the things

At this point, I have a dist folder with an index.html and its dependencies, ready to go. I know I need to spin up a webserver to serve these files over the web. Let’s then install nginx (or Apache) in the same server and serve the thing. I also need to install Node and a couple global node packages. Easy peasy, let’s do that…

“But wait, Carlos, that hmmm… that doesn’t feel like the right thing to do — you’d end up with a ton of stuff installed on your server and managing your dependencies will be a hell later on… just saying, though” — Inner self

Indeed, I needed a way to encapsulate the dependencies, the dist artifact and even the webserver so that it wouldn’t mess up my server. Let’s use Docker. It would let me build an image with my webserver running on a port on my server, and my server filesystem would barely notice what I just did. How cool, huh?

I set up a Dockerfile for my app and edited the job in Jenkins to build a docker image and run the container with the 80 port exposed. It worked like charm. I could access my app live from http://my.server.ip.

On scaling and stuff

I planned to have many applications deployed with this same schema using the same server. It wouldn’t make sense then to run Jenkins and all my containers in the same server. It just felt like I could do much better — I wanted to separate concerns. Sure I can juggle with different users, having Jenkins living in its own user, etc, but something within me really wanted to keep a machine specifically for building my applications.

Based on this premise, I created another droplet (aka server) with less memory (no heavy lifting, just to serve webapps) and with Docker installed as it should be able to run Docker containers. I would then run all my apps in this server. This would let me scale well because I could easily change the memory allocation on my build server, while leaving my apps untouched.

Let’s recap

We’ve made quite a good progress. We’ve settled for Docker as our core build mechanism and we also decided to separate concerns in favor of maintainability by spinning up a separate production server in another server.

Deployment workflow with Docker and 2 DO droplets

Useful links: