grtnr.de

Everything that goes with grtnr.de. It started with a ghost blog, but now contains more services.

To Do

• Setup AWS monitoring
  • Automatic restarting
  • Start dockers at node startup
• Backup
• Have certificates and HTTPS
• Make logo & favicon.ico

Note For secrets look in your password manager 😀

Server setup

For details about my server on AWS see here.

Code structure

The ghost docker setup currently is based on my ghost.docker.image, with additional, website specific configurations.

Code to server

We maintain all the settings of the docker settings within the ~/grtnr repository. The content (i.e. the ghost-content, ghost-database) are NOT within this repo (i.e. those directories are listed in .gitignore).

From here to the server all we need to do:

# Login to server
ssh [email protected]

# Shutdown currently running docker ghost network
cd grtnr
docker-compose down

# Get new version
git pull

# Restart
docker-compose up --build &

Initial install

When creating / installing the server initially, the following steps needed to be done:

• Setup the node and install docker. See here.

ssh-keygen -t rsa # Create a ssh key
# Add the key to the bitbucket repo readers

git clone [email protected]:tgartner/grtnr.de.git # Clone this repo

cp .env.sample .env
nano .env # Fillout the variables as needed

Testing locally

You can also test your setup locally. All the settings that differ from the production to the local environment are stored in the .env file in the root directory of the project.

To run the setup locally:

docker-compose up

Logging

I need to get hold of the logs of my containers and to have tools to monitor them - w/o having to read thru every line.... Since we use Loki at work, it would be a plus to use it here too.

Reading

• A promising scenario is desribed here
• A good overview of docker logging can be found in this article: Docker Logging: A Complete Guide
• Centralize Your Docker Logging With Syslog (Medium)

Question How could we import the settings and content from the production site into our local setup?

• Content should be easy
• Users & authors should be modified, as you don't want notification emails to go out to real life users...

Problems and solutions

Migration lock

Ghost doesn't start, i.e. interrupts startup with message Migration lock was never released or currently a migration is running.

The reason is a file access problem of the mysql data directory. I haven't tracked down exactly the root cause, but I could fix it this way:

cd mysql
sudo rm -rf * # Yes, we delete the entire mysql data directory...
cd ..
sudo chgrp root mysql
sudo chown 999 mysql

Then restart with docker-compose up...