JAJCE

Provision Dokku aoplications via Ansible

This project provides a comprehensive Ansible playbook designed to simplify the process of setting up and managing applications on a Dokku server. Dokku is a self-hosted PaaS (Platform as a Service) that helps you deploy and manage applications using Docker containers. This playbook automates the following key tasks:

• Creation and Configuration of Dokku Applications: Automates the creation of new applications on your Dokku server, ensuring that all necessary configurations are applied.
• Setup of Postgres Databases: Ensures that a Postgres database is created for each application and links the database to the application, facilitating easy and secure data storage.
• Enabling Let's Encrypt for HTTPS: Automates the setup of Let's Encrypt to provide HTTPS for your applications, enhancing security by encrypting the data exchanged between the server and clients.
• Creation of GitHub Actions Workflow: Automatically generates a GitHub Actions workflow file for continuous deployment, enabling automatic deployments to your Dokku server whenever changes are pushed to the main branch of your repository.

TLDR

Yes but how do I run it?

Firsty clone the repository, then set up as follows.

1. Install and setup ansible

make ansible

2. Make sure ssh connectivity to your dokku server is in place. The hosts.ini just has dokku. This can modified directly if a different hostname is preferrec, or details can just be added to ~/.ssh.config

Host dokku
  User dokku
  Hostname example.com
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/example.com/dokku_rsa

3. Add email and domain

An example file is included in group_vars/all/example.yml. Copy to group_vars/all/vars.yml and replace with your domain and email. The email is used for letsencrypt.

Now we should be able to create our first dokku deployment

make create

This will prompt fot the name of the new deployment.

RESULT

If the playbook is executed succesfully, a new project will be initialized on the dokku server, and a useable github action will be created in dist, an example is included here below

name: "dokku"

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
    steps:
      - name: Cloning repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0

      - name: Push to dokku
        uses: dokku/github-action@master
        with:
          branch: "main"
          git_remote_url: "ssh://[email protected]/~/austin"
          ssh_private_key: ${{ secrets.SSH_PRIVATE_KEY }}

ALIAS

While the dokku provisioner can be run from inside the repo with make create, its preferable to setup a bash/zsh function which means the provisioner can be run from anywhere on your computer - ideally within your repo. When run from your repo, the dokku deploy workflow will be created in .github/workflows/deploy.yml. This means your add will already have the workflow setup and ready to deploy to the newly provisioned dokku instance.

An alias can be set up something like this

dokku () {
  local dokkuloc=$HOME/jajce
  make -f $dokkuloc/Makefile $1 -C $dokkuloc CURDIR=$(pwd)
}