This is a simple demonstration repository to show how to use continuous integration and continuous deployment to deploy a web service with zero downtime. To do that, I am using some features in Docker Swarm to run multiple containers, such that during the short outage during a container upgrade, traffic is automatically routed to a healthy running instance.
I am using these things:
- PHP for scripting
- The Apache web-server
- GitHub for version control (obviously
;-)) - Docker to containerise the app
- Alpine Linux as a lightweight container OS
- Docker Swarm to run multiple containers in a service
- HTTP health-checks to help Docker maintain availability
- CircleCI for integration
- GitLab as a Docker image registry
- Vultr as a cloud Linux host
- Git tags as an auto-deployment trigger
If you're wanting to get this project working, but want to change individual things, go right ahead. For example, you could use a different Git host or Docker registry without much bother. The only thing that would need much more work to swap is CircleCI, since the configuration file is specific to their system.
The heart of this project is a CircleCI configuration containing two jobs: one (build)
for building and testing a Docker image, and the other (deploy) for deploying it
automatically. When pushing code, the first job will run, and it will build the
Dockerfile. If this works, it will try to start it and run a test on it.
If the developer pushes a deploy tag (i.e. with a prefix of deploy-) then the first
job will additionally tag the Docker image with the Git tag and will push it to
the Docker image registry. If this is all successful, the second job will SSH to the
remote machine, pull the image from the registry, and start a rolling Swarm update.
In this example, the Swarm service is always run using two replicas, so there is always one operational container to service incoming web requests. Docker Swarm uses a networking system called Routing Mesh together with the custom health-checks to determine how to update internal networking rules during a rolling update.
This material is not suitable for beginners. A basic understanding of the Linux command line, containers and general hosting concepts are pretty much essential.
To follow this tutorial, sign up for the following:
- GitHub
- Pretty much any VPS host
- GitLab
- CircleCI
The VPS host will generally cost some money. If you can go for a cloud provider they will charge very accurately, and as long as you destroy the machine when you are finished, you'll incur very low costs (less than one US dollar). I use Vultr, but there's also Digital Ocean, Linode and many others available.
Experienced users may wish to just follow these guideline steps. They are expanded upon later if extra guidance is required.
- Fork this repo
- Create a small server in the VPS host
- Create an empty project in GitLab (using the same name as the GitHub project)
- Connect CircleCI to GitHub and start building the project
- Customise the env vars in
config.ymland push - Install Docker in the remote server
- Create a registry token for CircleCI to do the image push
- Login to the Docker registry in the remote server
- Generate deployment keys
- Initialise a Docker swarm (
docker swarm init) - Start a Docker service in the remote
- Add a Git deployment tag and push that tag to kick off an automatic deployment
Optional steps:
- Obtain a domain/sub-domain and point it to the server IP
- Add other Docker machines into the Swarm (
docker swarm join)
The project name can be anything, but it may be easier to stick with
cd-demo-container.
To use CircleCI, you have to use either GitHub or BitBucket, at the time of writing. Although you can checkout from any Git repo, I don't think CircleCI will monitor code pushes on anything other than these two.
I use a machine with 1G of RAM but you might get away with less than that. I use Ubuntu as it is popular and widely supported, but if you prefer something else (Fedora, Centos, Debian, etc) then go for it.
If you're using Ubuntu, use the most recent stable Long Term Support version.
Your project URL will be https://gitlab.com/username/cd-demo-container, with the
appropriate swap for the username.
These vars will need to be changed in config.yml:
PROJECT_DOCKER_REGISTRY_USER: halfercode
PROJECT_DOCKER_IMAGE_URL: registry.gitlab.com/halfercode
PROJECT_DEPLOY_HOST: agnes.jondh.me.uk
You can probably leave these be (but change them if you know what you are doing):
PROJECT_DOCKER_REGISTRY: registry.gitlab.com
PROJECT_DOCKER_SERVICE_NAME: cd-demo
PROJECT_DEPLOY_USER: root
For Ubuntu, I like to use the Docker repository, since it is more up to date than the standard OS version, but use what works for you. Here are the installation notes.
Generate an access token in GitLab with the "api" permission. I believe that's the only permission with write access, and unfortunately is not per-project. You can choose the name for the token, I suggest "cd-demo-write". If you have high-value projects in GitLab, consider using a shorter expiry period, or perhaps even sign up for a separate account.
Then store the generated token somewhere safe, such as a password keeper.
Go to your project in CircleCI, click the cog icon, go to the "Environment Variables"
section, and create a new key called GITLAB_CDDEMO_REGISTRY_TOKEN. Paste in the new
token as the value of this variable.
This will be used by the docker login command in the CircleCI config to obtain
write access to your registry.
Generate an access token in GitLab with the "read_registry" permission. This is a read-only permission and will be used to pull images on your remote server. You can choose the name for the token, I suggest "cd-demo-read-only". It's worth noting that while you can reuse your read/write token here, it is better from a security perspective to only give the permissions that are actually needed.
As before, it is a good idea to store the generated token somewhere safe, such as a password keeper.
Finally, get a remote shell on the deployment target and enter the token in response to a login operation:
docker login --username halfercode registry.gitlab.com
A hash of your credentials will be stored in ~/.docker and thus will survive
a system reboot.
- Generate a SSH key pair
- Add the private key to CircleCI
- Add the public key to the deploy target using
ssh-copy-id
I have more details about this in this blog post.
After a Swarm has been initialised, run this on the manager node (of course, with suitable replacements for the repo URL and container name etc):
# Get latest tag from the Git repo
# (this lists available tags, removes the non-numeric prefix, sorts the
# numbers mathematically, gets the largest one, then adds the prefix back)
DEPLOY_VERSION=`git ls-remote --tags --refs \
[email protected]:halfer/cd-demo-container.git \
| grep deploy- \
| cut -f 2 \
| sed "s/refs\/tags\/deploy-v//" \
| sort --general-numeric-sort --reverse \
| head -n 1`
DEPLOY_TAG=deploy-v${DEPLOY_VERSION}
# Start service (if the image is not already pulled, this will do it for you)
docker service create \
--name cd-demo \
--env CD_DEMO_VERSION=${DEPLOY_TAG} \
--replicas 2 \
--with-registry-auth \
--publish 80:80 \
registry.gitlab.com/halfercode/cd-demo-container:${DEPLOY_TAG}
Docker Swarm will restart your service(s) automatically if you reboot the host. Try that now, to make sure it works for you.
The configuration is designed to run the build job on an ordinary code push, and
to run both the build and deploy jobs on a tag push.
To add a tag, you can use:
git tag -a deploy-v1
To push both commits and tags, you can use:
git push --follow-tags
I have a running instance of this service. This one is a bit different because, obviously, it runs via a secure site. This is achieved by adding a Traefik front-end proxy in front of the demo container.
To achieve zero-downtime continuous deployment, I used the technique shown in this video; I recommend watching it, as it is very well presented.
This material is licensed under the MIT License, which means you can pretty much do anything you like with it.
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