deployd

DeployD

This is a little helper daemon (hence the D) for the deployments on GoGraz.org. The idea is pretty simple: Once we push something to the master branch of our site's Github repository we want the site to be updated. A webhook on Github is triggered that notifies DeployD which in turn goes into a directory and executes make deploy there.

Usage

So how do you run this? First you should prepare a folder that contains a Makefile with a deploy target. What that does is completely up to your site. In our case make deploy generates some CSS out of SCSS files and runs hugo for the production environment.

Once you have that, simply start deployd like this:

$ deployd -project /path/to/your/project -host 127.0.0.1:8000 -secret yourSecretToken -statusFile /path/to/statusfile

DeployD listens on an interface and port that you specify with the -host flag and starts a simple HTTP server which you can then put behind an nginx or what have you.

Now you go to your site's Github settings page and set the webhook endpoint to wherever you've exposed the service to as well as enter the secret you specified when starting it.

DeployD will listen to any requests that is thrown its way only distinguishing between GET and POST requests to either return the latest deployment status or triggering a new deployment.

Internally, DeployD only allowed one update of the system to run in parallel. Any other request that is made while one update is running is replied to with a 409 Conflict status.

By default, DeployD will trigger a job execution no matter what valid payload it receives from Github. If you want only push events for a specific branch to matter, use the -branch flag.

How to build

go build

Current limitations

• If a deployment fails you only find out by either accessing DeployD via HTTP GET or looking at the content of the status file. In the future it might also send an email to a configured e-mail address.
• make has to be installed in /usr/bin/.