Auto Deploy¶

To streamline the merging and deployment process, this wiki automatically deploys upon merge to master.

In future, we're hoping to add preview environments for each PR.

Note: This process isn't live, yet.

How does it work?¶

Here's how the autodeploy works:

1. PR is merged¶

After a successful code review, the PR is merged. On merge, a GitHub Actions workflow starts.

2. Download to Production Server¶

The workflow downloads the project to the production server using git fetch, git checkout and git pull.

3. Build Site¶

The workflow builds the exact same container as in local development, so the output build is exactly the same. Unlike local development, this doesn't spin up a development server, instead it saves the site to the filesystem.

Production vs Development

The development server which comes with mkdocs isn't suited, nor suitable, for a production environment. For this, we build a custom container based off NGINX, which is far better suited, and allows for more control over the server. This container is built locally on the production server and is not pushed to any registry.

4. Restarting Container and Prune¶

Once the build of the site is complete the custom container (please see the note below) is started on the server using docker-compose. Within the same step old images are pruned. This is done automatically as quickly as possible, to minimize potential downtime during the switchover.

Configuration¶

The configuration for all this is available on GitHub.

Some notable files: