Blog/content/post/how-I-deploy-application.md

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Intro

In this post, I'm not gonna tell you what are the good practices to deploy applications. Instead, I just want to point out how, currently, I'm deploying new application in my homelab.

The idea is to make a kind of statement, that at this point in time, I was doing that way. Because ideally, in a near future, I'd adopt GitOps

This method is quite simple, I've tried to industraliaze it but still require quite a lot of manual operations. Also I'll show you how I update them, which is to me the biggest flaw. As my application pool keeps growing, it requires me more time to keep up.

Platform Overview

Let me break down the principal components involved:

Docker

(Explain briefly Docker)

I deploy using Docker whenever it is possible.

I'm using Docker compose for years now. At this time I only had a single server. Now I'm using VMs and I could migrate to a Docker Swarm, but I didn't. It might be a good idea, but this is not what I plan to do for the future. For the moment, I still use a single VM to host my Docker applications, which is more or less a clone of my old physical server.

Proxmox

(Explain briefly Proxmox)

My VM is hosted on my Proxmox cluster Proxmox cluster composed of 3 nodes, highly available with a Ceph distributed storage

Traefik

(Explain briefly Traefik)

Traefik is installed on the docker host to manage the HTTPS connections

OPNsense

(Explain briefly OPNsense)

On the fronted, there is an HA OPNsense cluster which redirect the HTTPS connections to Traefik using a Caddy plugin. TLS is not terminated by Caddy but only passed through to Traefik which manages the TLS certificates automatically.

Gitea

(Explain briefly Gitea)

In my homelab, I host a Gitea server. Inside I have a private repository where I host the docker compose configurations for my applications

Deploy New Application

I have a template docker-compose.yml which looks like this:

services:
  NAME:
    image: IMAGE
    container_name: NAME
    volumes:
      - /appli/data/NAME/:/
    environment:
      - TZ=Europe/Paris
    networks:
      - web
    labels:
    - traefik.enable=true
    - traefik.http.routers.NAME.rule=Host(`HOST.vezpi.com`)
    - traefik.http.routers.NAME.entrypoints=https
    - traefik.http.routers.NAME.tls.certresolver=letsencrypt
    - traefik.http.services.NAME.loadbalancer.server.port=PORT
    restart: always

networks:
  web:
    external: true

Steps to deploy a new application: From VScode:

• I create a new folder in that repository
• I copy the template file inside this folder
• I adapt the template with the values given by the application documentation
• I try to avoid using the latest tag for the images
• Eventually I create a .env file to store secrets which is ignored by the .gitignore of the repo
• If volumes are needed, I use bind mounts on a specific FS on the server
• I run the services directly from VScode using a Docker extension From OPNsense
• In the Caddy plugin, I update 2 Layer4 routes:
  • Depending if the application should be exposed on the internet or not, I have an Internal or External route. I add the URL given to Traefik in one of these.
  • I also add this URL in another route to redirect the HTTP challenge to Traefik

Finally I test the URL and it should work! Once everything work as expected, I commit the new folder on the repo

Update Application

Updating my applications is still manual to me. I don't use tools like Watchtower for now. Every month or so, I check for new versions. I check on the Docker hub, GitHub or on the application documentation.

For each of the application I want to uppdate, I look for new features, breaking changes and try to bump them to the latest version.

Most of the time, updating an application is straightforward. I update the image tag and restart the docker compose stack. Then I verify if the application restart properly, check the docker logs and test the application to detect any regression.

If the tests are successful I continue to update until I reach the latest version available. Once reached, I commit the update in the repository.

Conclusion

Using Docker