Deployment

Docker instructions

Requirements

  • Centos 7, RockyLinux 8, Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04, 22.04, known to work.

  • Hostname of Docker host must exist on the network. Must use bridge networking if Docker host is a Virtual Machine.

  • User running BIRDHOUSE_COMPOSE below must not be root but a regular user belonging to the docker group.

  • Install latest docker-ce and docker-compose for the chosen distro (not the version from the distro).

  • Have a real SSL Certificate, self-signed SSL Certificate do not work properly. Let’s Encrypt offers free SSL Certificate.

  • If using Let’s Encrypt, port 80 and 443 and hostname should be accessible publicly over the internet before requesting a certificate with Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt will need to access your hostname at port 80 and 443 in order to verify and provide the SSL certificate.

Command Line Interface (CLI)

The command line interface for interacting with the Birdhouse software can be found in bin/birdhouse (download </bin/birdhouse).

This CLI provides utilities to manage the Birdhouse software like a docker compose project, display build information, etc. It also provides a mechanism to execute commands in the Birdhouse configuration environment so that you can ensure that external scripts run with the current configuration settings enabled.

For a full description of the CLI usage run the CLI with the --help flag:

./bin/birdhouse --help

For convenience we recommend adding the birdhouse-deploy/bin/ directory to your PATH:

export PATH="$(readlink -f ./bin):$PATH"

# Now instead of running (from the root directory of this project):

./bin/birdhouse --help

# you can run (from anywhere):

birdhouse --help

# To ensure that your PATH variable always includes this directory in login shells:

echo "export PATH=$(readlink -f ./bin)"':$PATH' >> ~/.profile

Warning

It is no longer recommended to call scripts other than bin/birdhouse (download </bin/birdhouse) directly. In previous versions, we recommended interacting with the platform by calling scripts (like birdhouse-compose.sh or read-configs.include.sh) directly. These scripts have been left in place for backwards compatibility for now but may be moved or modified in some future version. We recommend updating any external scripts to use the CLI as soon as possible.

Quick-start

# Assuming Docker already installed, networking, hostname, firewall, open ports configured properly.

git clone https://github.com/bird-house/birdhouse-deploy.git
cd birdhouse-deploy/birdhouse
cp env.local.example env.local

$EDITOR env.local
# Set the following variables at the minimun:
#BIRDHOUSE_SSL_CERTIFICATE='/path/to/cert.pem'
#BIRDHOUSE_FQDN='<full qualified hostname of the current host>'
# Only needed if using LetsEncrypt SSL certificate
#BIRDHOUSE_SUPPORT_EMAIL='a real email to receivez LetsEncrypt renewal notification'

# Get the SSL Cert from LetsEncrypt, written to path of var BIRDHOUSE_SSL_CERTIFICATE.
FORCE_CERTBOT_E2E=1 FORCE_CERTBOT_E2E_NO_START_PROXY=1 deployment/certbotwrapper

# Start the full stack.
./bin/birdhouse compose up -d

Further explanations

To run docker-compose for Birdhouse, the bin/birdhouse (download </bin/birdhouse) file can be run with the compose argument. This will source the env.local file, apply the appropriate variable substitutions on all the configuration files “.template”, and run docker-compose with all the command line arguments after the compose argument. See env.local.example (download) for more details on what can go into the env.local file.

If the file env.local is somewhere else, symlink it here, next to docker-compose.yml (download) because many scripts assume this location.

To follow infrastructure-as-code, it is encouraged to source control the above env.local file and any override needed to customized this Birdhouse deployment for your organization. For an example of possible override, see how the emu service (download) (README) can be optionally added to the deployment via the override mechanism. Ouranos specific override can be found in this birdhouse-deploy-ouranos repo.

Suggested deployment layout:

├── birdhouse-deploy/  # this repo
│   ├── bin/
│   │   ├── birdhouse
│   ├── birdhouse/
│   │   ├── env.local  # relative symlink to env.local.real below
│   │   ├── (...)
├── private-config/    # your private config and override: sibling level of this repo
│   ├── docker-compose-extra.yml
│   ├── env.local.real
│   ├── .git/

The automatic deployment is able to handle multiple repos, so will trigger if this repo or your private-personalized-config repo changes, giving you automated continuous deployment. See the continuous deployment setup section below and the variable BIRDHOUSE_AUTODEPLOY_EXTRA_REPOS in env.local.example (download).

The automatic deployment of the Birdhouse platform, of the Jupyter tutorial notebooks and of the automatic deployment mechanism itself can all be enabled by following the scheduling instructions.

Resource usage monitoring (CPU, memory, ..) and alerting for the host and each of the containers can be enabled by following the monitoring instructions.

To launch all the containers, use the following command:

./bin/birdhouse compose up -d

If you get a 'No applicable error code, please check error log' error from the WPS processes, please make sure that the WPS databases exists in the postgres instance. See create-wps-pgsql-databases.sh (download).

Production deployment hardware recommendations

RAM: at least 128 GB, Thredds 32+ GB, Geoserver 8+ GB, leaving spaces for other components and all the various Jupyter users

CPU: at least 48 cores for parallel computations

Disk: at least 100 TB, depending how much data is hosted on Thredds and Geoserver and storage for the various Jupyter users

In general, the more users, the more cpu cores and memory needed. The more data, more memory and bigger and faster disks needed.

Note

  • All WPS requests should be completed within proxy_read_timeout of the Nginx proxy, see nginx.conf (download). Any WPS requests that will take longer should use the async mode.

    Default value PROXY_READ_TIMEOUT_VALUE in default.env (download).

    Overrideable in env.local file, as usual for all values in default.env file.

Manual steps post deployment

Create public demo user in Magpie for JupyterHub login

Use create-magpie-users (download) or follow manual instructions below.

config.yml file if using create-magpie-users:

users:
  - username: < value of JUPYTER_DEMO_USER in `env.local` >
    password: < you decide, at least 12 in length >
    email: < anything is fine >
    group: anonymous

Manual instructions:

  • Go to https://<BIRDHOUSE_FQDN>/magpie/ui/login and login with the MAGPIE_ADMIN_USERNAME user. The password should be in env.local.

  • Then go to https://<BIRDHOUSE_FQDN>/magpie/ui/users/add.

  • Fill in:

    • User name: <value of JUPYTER_DEMO_USER in env.local>

    • Email: < anything is fine >

    • Password: < you decide >

    • User group: anonymous

  • Click “Add User”.

Optional: prepare instance to run automated end-to-end test suite

An end-to-end integration test suite is available at https://github.com/Ouranosinc/PAVICS-e2e-workflow-tests with pre-configured Jenkins at https://github.com/Ouranosinc/jenkins-config.

For that test suite to pass, run the script scripts/bootstrap-instance-for-testsuite (download) to prepare your new instance. Further documentation inside the script.

Optional components all-public-access and secure-thredds also need to be enabled in env.local using BIRDHOUSE_EXTRA_CONF_DIRS variable.

ESGF login is also needed for https://github.com/Ouranosinc/pavics-sdi/blob/master/docs/source/notebooks/esgf-dap.ipynb part of test suite. ESGF credentials can be given to Jenkins via https://github.com/Ouranosinc/jenkins-config/blob/aafaf6c33ea60faede2a32850604c07c901189e8/env.local.example#L11-L13

The canarie monitoring link https://<BIRDHOUSE_FQDN>/canarie/node/service/stats can be used to confirm the instance is ready to run the automated end-to-end test suite. That link should return the HTTP response code 200.

Vagrant instructions

Vagrant allows us to quickly spin up a VM to easily reproduce the runtime environment for testing or to have multiple flavors of Birdhouse with slightly different combinations of the parts all running simultaneously in their respective VM, allowing us to see the differences in behavior.

See vagrant_variables.yml.example (download) for what’s configurable with Vagrant.

If using Centos box, follow disk-resize (download) after first vagrant up failure due to disk full. Then vagrant reload && vagrant provision to continue. If using Ubuntu box, no manual steps required, everything just works.

Install VirtualBox, both the platform and the extension pack, and Vagrant.

One time setup:

# Clone this repo and checkout the desired branch.

# Follow instructions and fill up infos in vagrant_variables.yml
cd ..  # to the folder having the Vagrantfile
cp vagrant_variables.yml.example vagrant_variables.yml

Starting and managing the lifecycle of the VM:

# start everything, this is the only command needed to bring up the entire
# Birdhouse platform
vagrant up

# get bridged IP address
vagrant ssh -c "ip addr show enp0s8|grep 'inet '"

# get inside the VM
# useful to manage the Birdhouse platform as if Vagrant is not there
# and use `birdhouse compose` as before
# ex: birdhouse compose ps
vagrant ssh

# power-off VM
vagrant halt

# delete VM
vagrant destroy

# reload Vagrant config if vagrant_variables.yml or Vagrantfile changes
vagrant reload

# provision again (because all subsequent vagrant up won't provision again)
# useful to test all provisioning scripts or to bring a VM at unknown state,
# maybe because it was provisioned too long ago, to the latest state.
# not needed normally during tight development loop
vagrant provision

Framework tests

Core features of the platform has tests to prevent regressions.

To run the tests:

python3 -m pip install -r tests/requirements.txt
pytest tests/

Some tests require internet access (to access JSON schemas used to validate JSON structure). If you need to run tests offline, you can skip the tests that require internet access by using the -k ‘not online’ pytest option.

Tagging policy

We are trying to follow the standard of semantic versioning.

The standard is for one application. Here we have a collection of several apps with different versions and we want to track which combination of versions works together. So we need a slight modification to the definition of the standard.

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

  1. MAJOR version when the API or user facing UI changes that requires significant documentation update and/or re-training of the users. Also valid when a big milestone has been reached (ex: DACCS is released).

  2. MINOR version when we add new components or update existing components that also require change to other existing components (ex: new Magpie that also force Twitcher and/or Frontend update) or the change to the existing component is a major one (ex: major refactoring of Twitcher, big merge with corresponding upstream component from birdhouse project).

  3. PATCH version when we update existing components without impact on other existing components and the change is a minor change for the existing component.

To help properly update versions in all files that could reference to the latest tag, the bump2version utility is employed. Running this tool will modify versions in files referencing to the latest revision (as defined in .bumpversion.cfg) and apply change logs updates by moving Unreleased items under a new version matching the new version.

In order to handle auto-update of the releaseTime value simultaneously to the generated release version, the bump2version call is wrapped in Makefile.

One of the following commands should be used to generate a new version.

# bump to a specific semantic version
make VERSION="<MAJOR>.<MINOR>.<PATCH>" bump

# bump the next semantic version automatically
make bump (major|minor|patch)

# test result without applying it
make VERSION="<MAJOR>.<MINOR>.<PATCH>" bump dry

To validate, you can look up the resulting version and release time that will be written to RELEASE.txt. The current version can also be requested using the following command.

make version

Once the version as been bumped and the PR is merged, a corresponding version tag should be added to the commit generated by the merge. This step is intentionally manual instead of leaving it up to bump2version to auto-generate the tag in other to apply it directly on master branch (onto the merge commit itself), instead of onto the commits in the PR prior merging.

Release Procedure

  • Pull/merge latest master to make sure modifications are applied in CHANGES.md, in next step, are under the most recent “unreleased” section.

  • Update CHANGES.md, commit, push.

  • Open a PR with the new content from CHANGES.md as the PR description. PR description can have more pertinent info, ex: test results, staging server location, other discussion topics, that might or might not be relevant in CHANGES.md. Use your judgement.

  • Wait for a PR approval.

  • Review PR description if something needs to be added or updated after the PR review process. The goal is for the PR description to capture all the essential informations for someone else not participating in the PR review process to understand it easily. This “someone else” might even be your future self trying to understand what was going through your mind when you opened this PR :)

  • Only when you are ready to merge the PR immediately, you can continue with the following steps to. Doing the following steps too early and you might lose the “push race” if someone else is also trying to release at the same time. Also, in the spirit of not losing the “push race”, execute all these steps together, do not take a break in the middle.

    • Merge with master branch, if needed, so next make bump <major|minor|patch> step will bump to the proper next version. Might need to review the places where CHANGES.md items were inserted following merge to make sure the new ones by this PR are under “unreleased”.

    • Run make bump <major|minor|patch> with appropriate options, as described in “Tagging policy” section above. Push.

    • Merge this PR, copying the entire PR description into the merge commit description. This is so that the page https://github.com/bird-house/birdhouse-deploy/tags will contain relevant info nicely. That page was previously used as an ad-hoc changelog before CHANGES.md was formally introduced.

    • Run git tag on the commit created the by merge, with the same tag as make bump <major|minor|patch> generated.

    • Run git push --tags to upload the new version.