Deploying¶

This project (along with its docs!) is deployed to Fly.io. GitHub Actions is configured to deploy the project whenever changes are pushed to the main branch. (You can see how the commands are configured under .github/workflows/fly.yaml and .github/workflows/fly-docs.yaml.)

However, there are still some little quirks I have yet to work out. For example, the only way to configure the prod environment variables is to do either one of the following:

Manually update them on the Fly.io Dashboard
Update them locally in a .env.production file and then run make fly-secrets

I haven’t figured out how to pass secrets from GitHub to GitHub Actions without having to manually authenticate to Fly.io.

Manually Deploying¶

I also configured the project in such a way that I can deploy from my laptop. (Actually, I did that first to see if it worked before trying to do so via GitHub Actions, and then I was too lazy to remove this feature once I got GitHub Actions working.)

These steps below are more for me than for anyone else, as they assume you’ve completed the following tasks:

Set up hosting for media assets (using Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage)
Set up hosting for the actual web app (using Fly.io)
Set up a .env.production file for storing secrets used in the prod environment

Wagtail has a nice guide for deploying to Fly.io, which is what I used initially. However, I deviated from the instructions towards the end; after running fly launch, I chose to NOT overwrite my .dockerignore or my Dockerfile, as doing so led to deployment errors. I then found and used Tom Usher’s blog series on deploying Wagtail to Fly.io to get me over the hump of deployment errors.

After the initial setup is done, you can run

make fly-auth

to authenticate (if you aren’t already authenticated). Once that’s done, you can deploy by running

make fly-deploy