Black Sword Group

I have been working on figuring out a way to rapidly deploy rails apps to Digital Ocean while also not worrying about data loss. I have found that having a nice CI/CD pipeline speeds up development enormously even if it takes a bit of time to set up. My approach is as follows:

keep all code in a self hosted gitea instance, one repo per project
use cron to download all repos, compress, encrypt, and back them up offsite
when I want to spin up digital ocean droplet, use the bash script shown below
use gitea actions to push code updates
- new features get merged into a dev branch
- dev branch automatically deployed to a local VM
- when features are ready to go to production dev gets merged into main
- gitea actions push the code to the droplet
on the droplet, use cron to compress, encrypt, and back up the SQLite production database file

This approach is simple and fast. It allows for rapid development and deployment which is exactly what I'm trying to optimize for in my quest to release a bunch of rails applications in a short time. If I ever want to deploy to a different cloud provider, the bash script below can be turned into a go tool with a cloud provider interface as well as concrete implementations for different providers. Here is the script as well as a cloud-init file I use:

provision.sh

#!/bin/bash
# Parse arguments 

cleanup=0 
website_name=""

while (( "$#" )); do 
  case "$1" in 
    -c|--cleanup)
      cleanup=1
      shift
      ;;
    -n|--name)
      website_name="$2"
      if [ -z $website_name ]; then 
        echo "Error: website name must be provided using -n flag"
        exit 1
      fi
      shift 2 
      ;;
    -*|--*=)
      echo "Unsupported flag $1" >&2
      exit 1
  esac 
done 

if [ -z $website_name ]; then 
  echo "Error: website name must be provided using -n flag"
  exit 1 
fi 

if [ "$cleanup" = 1 ] ; then
  if [ ! -f "$website_name-key" ]; then 
    echo "Error: $website_name-key" does not exist
    exit 1
  fi
  if ! rm -rf "$website_name-key"; then 
    echo "Error: failed to remove $website_name-key"
    exit 1
  fi

  if [ ! -f "$website_name-key.pub" ]; then 
    echo "Error: $website_name-key.pub does not exist"
    exit 1
  fi
  if ! rm -rf "$website_name-key.pub"; then 
    echo "Error: failed to remove $website_name-key.pub"
    exit 1 
  fi 

  if [ ! -f "$website_name-config.yml" ]; then 
    echo "Error: $website_name-config.yml does not exist"
    exit 1 
  fi 
  if ! rm -rf "$website_name-config.yml"; then 
    echo "Error: failed to $website_name-config.yml"
    exit 1
  fi
  
  doctl compute droplet delete "$website_name"
  exit
fi 

# Generate ssh keys to use for the droplet
if [ -f "./$website_name-key" ]; then
  echo "Error: $website_name-key already exists"
  exit 1
fi
if ! ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f "./$website_name-key" -q -N "" ; then 
  echo "Error: failed to create new ssh key"
  exit 1
fi

if [ ! -f "base-config.yml" ]; then 
  echo "Error: base-config.yml does not exist"
  exit 1 
fi 

public_key=$(cat $website_name-key.pub)
if ! sed -e "s/website-name/$website_name/" -e "s/website-public-key/$public_key/" <base-config.yml >"$website_name-config.yml"; then 
  echo "Error: failed to create $website_name-config.yml"
  exit 1 
fi 

# Add ssh key to digital ocean team account (in case we need to recover on root)
if ! doctl compute ssh-key import "$website_name-key" --format ID --public-key-file "./$website_name-key.pub"; then 
  echo "Error: failed to import ssh key"
  exit 1 
fi 

# Create a new droplet in ny region with the name of the website. 
if ! doctl compute droplet create "$website_name" --region sfo2 --image ubuntu-22-04-x64 --size s-1vcpu-1gb --user-data-file "$website_name-config.yml"; then
  echo "Error: failed to create droplet"
  exit 1
fi

base-config.yml

#cloud-config 

users:
  - default
  - name: website-name
    shell: /bin/bash 
    lock_passwd: true
    groups:
      - sudo
      - docker
    sudo:
      - ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL
    ssh_authorized_keys:
      - website-public-key
apt:
  sources:
    docker.list:
      source: deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $RELEASE stable
      keyid: 9DC858229FC7DD38854AE2D88D81803C0EBFCD88
packages:
  - docker-ce 
  - docker-ce-cli 
  - containerd.io 
  - docker-buildx-plugin 
  - docker-compose-plugin
  - ca-certificates 
  - curl

Deploying Rails Projects