handbook

Living styleguide and development best practices for Blackbird Studios.

Table of Contents

• Workflow
• Infrastructure
• Useful Processes

Workflow

• GitHub branches should be utilized as follows:

  • master: "Stable" code. Usually corresponds to production environments. Developers should not push new features to this branch. Ideally, this branch should only be pushed to after code has been thoroughly tested.
  • dev: The "working" branch for any given project. Developers can push small changes to this branch, but for larger features, a separate branch should be made and then merged in. Usually corresponds to development and/or staging environments depending on the project.
  • staging: This branch is useful for larger projects, but most likely not applicable to most of the prototypes we build. The staging environment can also be considered as pre-production. This is a good branch to run tests on before deploying.

• For larger projects, we have continuous integration set up with Jenkins.

• External resources:

  • http://guides.beanstalkapp.com/deployments/best-practices.html
  • https://blog.codeship.com/continuously-deploying-single-page-apps/

Infrastructure

• Blackbird uses Amazon Web Services for most of our infrastructure.
• A typical EC2 instance:
  • Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS, 64-bit
  • t2.micro, 1GB memory

Useful Processes

Set Up GitHub Deploys Using Git Hooks

Inspired by this Digital Ocean guide: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-automatic-deployment-with-git-with-a-vps

Remote Machine

1. SSH into your remote server and make sure that git is installed:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install git

1. If they don't exist already, create /var/www (for build files) and /var/repo (for source files) and cd into /var/repo. Create a folder within /var/repo for your code to live. Initialize that folder as a bare git repository.

mkdir -p {/var/www/example.com,/var/repo/repository.git}
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www
sudo chown -R ubuntu /var/www/example.com
sudo chown -R ubuntu /var/repo/repository.git
cd /var/repo/repository.git
git init --bare

1. Now let's create our post-receive hook:

cd hooks
cat > post-receive

1. And configure our shell script. You can also add any other shell commands you'd like to run on deploy to this script:

#!/bin/sh
git --work-tree=/var/www/example.com --git-dir=/var/repo/repository.git checkout -f

1. ctrl+d to save, and set up the proper permissions:

chmod +x post-receive

For tips of configuring nginx with multiple domains/subdomains, this DigitalOcean tutorial is great:

• https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-nginx-server-blocks-virtual-hosts-on-ubuntu-14-04-lts

Local Machine

1. Ok, now we need to switch over to our dev machine (the machine we'll be deploying from). cd to the git repo that you want to push to your remote server and add a new remote called live:

git remote add live ssh://ubuntu@[IP_ADDRESS]/var/repo/[PROJECT_NAME].git

1. And that's it! If all goes well, you can deploy your code to your server:

git push live master