elviswolcott / uchicago-deploy

Automate deployments to your UChicago homepage

Automate deployments to your UChicago homepage

Setup

Add .travis.yml to your repository, change the CNETID in line 15 to your CNet ID, and enable builds for the repository at travis-ci.com. Then, copy after_deploy.sh and deploy.sh into your repository.

The most complex part of setup is creating and encrypting an SSH key to allow Travis to SSH into linux.cs.uchicago.edu.

1. Create an SSH key and save it to deploy_rsa and deploy_rsa.pub without a password.

   ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C '[e-mail]' -f deploy_rsa

2. Encrypt the private key so that only Travis can read it (requires the Travis CLI).

   travis encrypt-file deploy_rsa

3. Look through the output for something like

   storing secure env variables for decryption
   
   Please add the following to your build script (before_install stage in your .travis.yml, for instance):
   
       openssl aes-256-cbc -K $encrypted_f1dcb18ceeef_key -iv $encrypted_f1dcb18ceeef_iv -in deploy_rsa_.enc -out deploy_rsa -d
   
   Pro Tip: You can add it automatically by running with --add.
   

   All that matters is the hash (the part between encrypted and key. For example in $encrypted_f1dcb18ceeef_key the hash is f1dcb18ceeef. Take this value and replace the hashes in line 19 of .travis.yml.
4. Copy the public key to linux.cs.uchicago.edu to allow connections using the private key.

   ssh-copy-id -i deploy_rsa.pub <your-cnetid>@linux.cs.uchicago.edu

5. Optional: test the key by using it to SSH into linux.cs.uchicago.edu.

   chmod 600 deploy_rsa
   ssh -i deploy_rsa <your-cnetid>@linux.cs.uchicago.edu

6. Delete the plaintext key (DO NOT EVER CHECK THIS IN TO SOURCE CONTROL).

   rm deploy_rsa
   rm deploy_rsa.pub

7. Check in the encrypted key and deploy scripts.

   git add deploy_rsa.enc deploy.sh after_deploy.sh .travis.yml
   git commit -m "add encrypted ssh key"
   git push

Note for Windows (WSL) users

This setup has been tested using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to run Ubuntu bash. (Official installation guide)

SSH will not accept keys that are readable by other users. By default, WSL doesn't track Linux permission bits on drives mounted by Windows (more information on the WSL blog). This means chmod won't actually change the permissions on your key!

Luckily, recent versions of windows (newer than 17063 should work) support storing additional metadata for files to have Linux and Windows.

Open /etc/wsl.conf in your editor of choice

vi /etc/wsl.conf

and copy in these settings.

[automount]
enabled = true
options = "metadata"
mountFsTab = false

Restart Windows to ensure changes take effect.

Running a build

By default, Travis will not deploy your site to your personal homepage when you make a commit, even though it will run tests. This is because you don't always want your site to have the latest version of your code (especially if something is a WIP). To handle this, Travis has been set to only run the deploy stage on the master branch when a tag is present. Tags are basically pointers to a certain commit and can be created with git tag.

To deploy the contents of the master branch:

git checkout master
git pull
git tag "message"
git push --tags
git push

This will ensure you are on the latest commit, tag it with your message (often a version number like 1.0.4) and push the commits and tags to GitHub. The Travis build will notice the tag and run the deploy stage after tests (this means it won't deploy if your tests fail).

How it works

When you make a commit, Travis starts the jobs defined in .travis.yml. Each stage starts with installing dependencies and finishes with running a particular script. If one stage passes, the build continues to the next stage.

The provided setup is fairly simple, it runs tests on each commit. If there is a tag, Travis runs a build and then deploys the files to your personal homepage.

The deploy process is fairly simple. First, it establishes a ssh connection to linux.cs.uchicago.edu and copies over the built files. Then, it runs after_deploy.sh on linux.cs.uchicago.edu to set the proper permissions on the files for the webserver to read them. You can look in .travis.yml, deploy.sh and after_deploy.sh if you are interested in how exactly this is accomplished.

Troubleshooting

This config expects npm test to run any tests for your site and npm run build to produce a static version of your site in the build directory. This works with create-react-app out of the box and most common webpack based setups.

If you are using a different setup, the .travis.yml can be modified to run different commands by changing replacing npm test and npm run build or changing the environment variables (under env) to different paths.

For more information on how to customize your build, see the Travis CI docs.

For more information on personal homepages, see the How do I? page.