Simple non-containerize application with GitHub actions

Table of contents

Intro

I worked on many projects with Github as DevOps in my team. I have a responsibility to deliver applications from development to production. At first, I did it manually. I started to feel this is always reprising every time there is a change in the application.

Our production environment still uses a bare metal server. The application ran on VMs created in proxmox. Production ran a simple stack. but if a change or feature is added to the Github repository my dev friends say, “Hey I added new feature, can you deploy it?” and it keeps repeating. until I found solution to create Github actions that can continuously check and deliver the application.

provisioning DB

Our application depends on PostgreSQL. I used containerize DB because it’s simple to provisioning and you know.. I want to keep the server clean. to realize it creates a docker-compose file to automate provisioning.

let’s make this up in daemon mode.

docker-compose -f docker-compose.db.yml up -d

Create deploy.sh

to automate working my repeating task in deployment, I use simple bash scripting.
this script would be run every deployment.

the working directory would be stashing before pulling the repository, this is done so that there is no conflict merge. and then did pulling repo. in production have little change configuration settings like DB. I use sed to change the settings file with one line. make sure already migrated. it always restarts service gunicorn and nginx to minimalization failure. see how to create gunicorn.service file.

Setup Github actions workflow

The first thing we should do is create GitHub secrets. Github secrets are encrypted secrets allowing us to store sensitive information in your organization, repository, or repository environments. learn more here.

SSH_KEY         -> ssh private key (for server connection)
SSH_PORT        -> ssh port
SSH_PASSPHRASE  -> optional but highly recommended
SSH_HOST        -> host ssh server (target server)

may you ask “Why Host and Port should be in github secrets?” i recommend to keep all data of server is encyrpted and secret for security purpose. next, what I did is set up Github actions to trigger change and run deploy.sh over ssh. here are my Github actions