Containers

Note

This page assumes that you have SSH access to the IN-SMN server. It may still be useful if you do not have access but are developing software that will be deployed to our servers.

Almost all software hosted on the IN-SMN server runs in Docker containers managed with Docker Compose.

Compose files are stored in two main locations:

/root/SMN/docker-compose.yml contains the configuration for core/static services that do not require automatic updates. These include Traefik, Authentik, Mosquitto, LMixer, and others.
/home/deploy/ holds directories for automatically deployed applications, which each have their own Compose file that references a published Docker image. For details, see Automatic deployment.

If a container hosts a website that should be accessible, it should define labels as detailed on the Traefik page.

If you change a docker-compose.yml file, you can run docker compose up -d in its directory to restart only the affected containers.

Automatic deployment

We use GitHub Actions to automatically build, push, pull, and restart containers on the server whenever changes are made to a project repository's main branch.

Since we pretty much always do the same thing, we have a workflow that is reused.

To set up automatic deployment:

Copy /home/deploy/example-app and modify its configuration as needed.

Copy the workflow template and configure it as detailed in its README.

The workflow connects to the server over SSH as the deploy user. Its credentials are stored as secrets in the chapter's GitHub organization and are exposed to workflows as SSH_HOST, SSH_USERNAME, and SSH_KEY.

These secrets are made available automatically to workflows running on public repositories. If the repository is private, you need to add the SSH credentials manually.

Configuring Andesite

Andesite's behavior can be configured using inputs under jobs.with.

Example: Enable caching with GHA:

jobs:
  secrets: inherit
  with:
    deploy-dir: docs
    cache: "gha"
    gha-mode: "min"

Here is a list of all options and their effects:

Key	Type	Default	Description
deploy-dir	string	N/A (required)	The folder containing `docker-compose.yaml`, e.g. `/home/deploy/<deploy-dir>/docker-compose.yaml`
context-dir	string	"."	The folder containing the Dockerfile. Use this if it is not in the root directory. Prefix it with `./`, e.g. `./website/`
cache	"gha" or ""	""	Enables caching during the Docker build step. "gha" caches all intermediate steps.
gha-mode	"min" or "max"	"min"	Controls how aggressively "gha" caching is performed. See GHA caching mode
use-lfs	boolean	false	Whether the repository uses LFS to track files
limit-lfs-to-directory	string	""	Fetches LFS files only from a specific folder rather than the entire repository. Useful for monorepos

Containers

Automatic deployment

Configuring Andesite

On this page