infra.md

Docker

The environment for this app is built using Docker, and the app runs in production using Docker Swarm. Our The docker directory has the following files:

• Dockerfile.base: base Docker image, used to build anikalaw/clerkbase
• Dockerfile: final Docker image, used to build anikalaw/clerk
• docker.compose.local.yml: Docker Compose config for local development
• docker.compose.staging.yml: Docker Swarm config for test environment
• docker.compose.prod.yml: Docker Swarm config for prod environment

Deployment

Deployment is done via a GitHub workflow here A deployment involves SSHing into the target server and updating the Docker Swarm config. Deployment must be manually triggered from GitHub. There are two environments to deploy to, test and prod:

• test backend, which is deployed to by develop, used by the test frontend
• prod backend, which is deployed to by master, used by the prod frontend

When making a change or bugfix, you should:

• create a feature branch from develop called feature/my-branch-name and test it locally
• merge the branch into develop and trigger a release to the test environment
• check your changes in the test environment
• merge the develop into master trigger a release of your change to prod

Infrastructure

There are two containers that run the application. A Django web server and a Django Q worker server. Both connect to a common database.

The application runs on Docker Swarm. The test and prod environments both run on a single AWS EC2 instance. That instance also contains the PostgreSQL database and a NGINX server which reverse proxies requests into the Docker containers.

Database backups are taken manually and stored in s3://anika-database-backups. Uploaded files are stored in s3://anika-clerk and s3://anika-clerk-test. Other than uploaded files and the contents of the PostgreSQL database, there is no important state on the EC2 instance or Docker images, which can be blown away and rebuilt at will. The only thing that will change is that EC2 instance IP address, which will need to be updated in CloudFlare.

DNS is handled by CloudFlare, which also does SSL termination for us.

Emails are sent using SendGrid.

Infra config can be found in the infra repo.

Logging and Error Reporting

• All application logs are logged to Sumo Logic.
• Errors are reported to Sentry.
• Application uptime is tracked by StatusCake.