Running In Production

A production environment can be built by Nix. The generated output doesn’t have additional requirements. The application can be run by a start script directly or using the Docker image built by Nix. Static assets are built separately and can be served by the included minimal Nginx. As for the application itself, we can build a standalone start script or a Docker image.

NixOS Module

There’s a NixOS module in nix/modules/default.nix to run the backend.

See ekklesia.nix in ekklesia-deploy for an example on how to use the module. In ekklesia-deploy, you can also see how you can pin the version of ekklesia-portal using niv and how to service static files with Nginx.

With Docker

By default, Docker images are tagged with a version string derived from the last Git tag. You can set a different tag by adding --argstr tag mytag to the docker*.nix calls.

  • Build app image as docker-image-ekklesia-portal.tar and import it:

    ./docker.nix --argstr tag mytag docker load -i docker-image-ekklesia-portal.tar
    
  • Build and import static file image:

    ./docker_static.nix --argstr tag mytag docker load -i docker-image-ekklesia-portal-static.tar
    
  • Run app container:

    docker run -p 127.0.0.1:8080:8080 -it -v $(pwd)/config-docker.yml:/config.yml ekklesia-portal:mytag
    
  • Run static file container:

    docker run -p 127.0.0.1:8081:8080 -it ekklesia-portal-static:mytag
    

The app is now served at port 8080 and static files at port 8081 which are only reachable from localhost (127.0.0.1).

Directly From Source

  • Build and run app with the config file config.yml:

    nix-build nix/serve_app.nix -o serve_app && serve_app/bin/run
    

To change the config location, set the environment variable EKKLESIA_PORTAL_CONFIG.

  • Build static assets and run Nginx:

    nix-build nix/serve_static.nix -o serve_static && serve_static/bin/run
    
  • Build static assets for use with another web server:

    nix-build nix/static_files.nix -o static_files