Usage in Production

The provisioning scripts are designed to be run independently of Vagrant in order to provision production environments that match those used in development. While provisioning is not as simple as vagrant up, it is very straightforward.

Production-specific features

There are several features that are only available in production environments. These include:

In addition, the following features behave differently when in a production environment:

  • SSH access: the vagrant user is not on the list of SSH allowed users
  • Python dependencies: only requirements.txt is considered, dev_requirements.txt is ignored
  • Node dependencies: in package.json, only dependencies is considered, devDependencies is ignored
  • The pull+ shortcut command performs additional steps

Configuration

Due to the additional features supported in production environments, some additional configuration may be required. The following are some of the things to consider:

Of particular importance is the nginx site config. It must be modified to, at least, provide the server_name directive.

Provisioning

Provisioning in a production environment is not quite as simple as vagrant up, it requires a few more steps:

  1. Create the /opt/app/src directory.

  2. Copy the project source, including provisioning files into /opt/app/src. The provisioning files should be at /opt/app/src/provision. The easiest way to do this is probably to clone your git repository, if you use one.

  3. Manually invoke the provisioning bootstrap script as root, passing it the name of the project:

    $ /opt/app/src/provision/scripts/bootstrap.sh project_name_here

There are several final steps that automated provisioning does not take care of. This may be because they are unsafe to include in the provisioning process (e.g. in the event of re-provisioning), or because user input is required.

  • sudo apt-get upgrade (see the limitations documentation for more details)
  • In order to have sudo privileges, a password needs to be created for the webmaster user. When logged in as the webmaster user, simply run the passwd command to set a password.