Deployment To My Server

Deployment

After setting up the build process and storing my images in DigitalOcean Container Registry, the next step was to automate deployment. I decided to use GitHub Actions because it gives me a simple, repeatable workflow that runs every time I push a new version of my application.

The workflow has a few steps which I describe below with code snippets for each of them included.

• Prepare the server by creating the target directory. If it already exists, remove it and recreate a fresh one so no old files remain that could cause issues.

  
  DEPLOY_DIR=${{ vars.APP_DIR }}
  if [ -d "$DEPLOY_DIR" ]; then
    echo "Folder exists. Cleaning up..."
    sudo find "$DEPLOY_DIR" -mindepth 1 -exec rm -rf {} +
  else
    echo "Directory does not exist. Creating..."
    sudo mkdir -p "$DEPLOY_DIR"
  fi
                                      

• Copy the required files into the new directory. This includes the Docker Compose file and the Nginx configuration.

  
  rsync -avz -e "ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no" \
  docker-compose.yml init_db.sql scheduledb-backup.sql applyDbBackup.bat nginx certbot \
  ${{ secrets.DROPLET_USER }}${{ secrets.DROPLET_IP }}:${{ vars.APP_DIR }}
                                      

• Log in to the Docker Container Registry (DOCR) so the deployment workflow can pull the latest images for my services.

  
  echo "${{ secrets.REGISTRY_TOKEN }}" | docker login registry.digitalocean.com -u ${{ secrets.REGISTRY_USER_NAME }} --password-stdin
                                      

• Run a few Docker commands to start the updated containers and bring the application online.

  
  
  sudo docker compose down --Stops and removes all containers, networks, and resources
  sudo docker compose up -d --Starts all containers defined in docker compose
  sudo docker system prune -f --Removes unused Docker resources
  sudo docker compose ps --Displays the status of containers managed by Docker Compose