VIS App Integration Guide

This guide informs you about how to build apps that integrate well with the existing VIS infrastructure. If you have any questions, put your questions into the #it-chitchat channel on our slack.

Usage

Throughout all guides we will assume that you know the basics of docker.

In the VIS infastructure, we want every app to be based on the same base image, base. The container is currently based on Debian stretch. It enforces that you specify certain environment variables and allow the Computer Infractructure Team to deploy certain changes to all containers.

We also provide specialised base images, see the respective repositories for a detailed documentation. Available images are:

base: Base image without any specialisation
nginx: Custom self-compiled nginx with easy configuration
python: Python 3 runtime
gitbook: Static website builder using Markdown

See the VIS Base document on how to interact with the base image.

Conventions

Files

If you want to run your application in production, it will have to satisfy some constraints.

fancy_app
├── Dockerfile
├── README.md
├── .gitlab-ci.yml
├── src
│   └── CAT_source.stuff
└── test-data
    ├── maria.in
    ├── mongo.in
    └── postgres.in

This is the structure that every VIS app should have in order to be able to run in production and to be easily maintained by VIS members of the future.

Also, you will have to specify certain environment variables and you will get information on the DB location, deployment path, passwords etc. via environment variables. These variables are specified below. NEVER hardcode their values.

README.md

Document assumptions, deviations from our usual conventions and things that a sysadmin or fellow developer should know before reading any other of your files.

Dockerfile

Package your app. Depend on the latest version of the base image which is delta. Do not specify either ENTRYPOINT or CMD. Use cinit to hook your programs into the container

.gitlab-ci.yml

Specify a pipeline to automatically build and deploy the app. See the CI-guide for the configuration.

src

Your actual application should be in the src/ directory. This is completely your domain.

test-data

You can provide some test data for your application in the directory test-data/. The given data will be loaded into the databases. See visdev repo for more information on that.

Branches

These branches should be present:

production: This branch carries the code running in production.
staging: This branch carries the code running in staging.

Apart from this there are no constraints.

Docker tags

The production branch is built into the Docker image tagged production. Analogously for staging. There are no other constraints.

Introduction