deployments.md

Table of contents

Deployments

We use now by Vercel for all of our deployments.

Installation

We recommend installing the now desktop app as it'll keep the command line tool up to date automatically!

If you'd rather not install an app (or are using Windows Substem for Linux) you can also install now with npm:

npm install -g now

Naming scheme

All our workers are aliased to <workername>.workers.spectrum.chat, with the one exception being the API (the API server) which runs at api.spectrum.chat.

Path aliases

Now's path alias feature takes care of routing requests to the right workers. To see our current production aliases check the rules.json file in the root of the project.

To deploy new rules, simply run the following command: (assuming rules.json has the changes)

now alias spectrum.chat -r rules.json

The same command with a different URL and slightly adapted rules can also be used to create an alpha/beta/staging/... version of the site.

Frontend and Hyperion

Since the frontend is the part that changes the most often the repo is set up such that typing now in the root directory will deploy the frontend with hyperion. (the server-side rendering worker)

Deploying

First, make sure you're in the Space Program now team:

now switch spaceprogram

Note: If you haven't been added to the now team yet ask one of your coworkers to add you!

Second, deploy a new version of the app:

now

This will do an immutable deploy of the hyperion and will return a unique URL that this specific version is accessible at. (something like spectrum-grtertb34.now.sh)

Third, test that version of the app to make sure the new feature(s) work(s) as expected in production. Note that nobody except for people will access to the unique URL from the last step can access it at this point.

Fourth, if you're happy with the new feature(s) alias your unique URL to hyperion.workers.spectrum.chat to make it immediately available to all users:

now alias spectrum-grtertb34.now.sh hyperion.workers.spectrum.chat

And that's it, you've now deployed a new version of hyperion and the frontend!

Other workers

We use backpack to get a nice development setup and build process in place for our workers. Since this is a mono-repo and now doesn't have any special functionality to handle monorepos we have to deploy the built version of the workers. (compared to the frontend deploy where you deploy the raw code which gets built on the server)

Deploying

First, build the worker you want to deploy to get a bundle with the newest code rather than deploying a stale version:

yarn run build:<workername>

Note: Replace <workername> with the name of the worker you want to deploy

Then deploy the build-<workername> folder with now:

now build-<workername>

As an example, to deploy athena I'd run these commands:

# First:  Build the worker
yarn run build:athena
# Second: Deploy the built bundle
now build-athena

This will give you an immutable deploy with a unique URL of this worker, something like https://build-athena-ahsgut23sdyf.now.sh.

Replacing the old deploy

Since we want to keep the workers alive even if nobody sends a request to their healthcheck endpoints we alias them to <workername>.workers.spectrum.chat. This ensures now overrides the older deploy and only the newest code is running.

To alias your deploy run now alias:

now alias <uniqueurl>.now.sh <workername>.workers.spectrum.chat

For example, for our athena deploy from above this would be:

now alias build-athena-ahsgut23sdyf.now.sh athena.workers.spectrum.chat