Reserve testing environments effectively.

About

See caveats below

This application has a very specific use, to let you reserve testing environments for your apps while working with multiple apps and testing environments. It's well-suited for organizations that use the microservice architecture with separate testing, integration and production environments. It lets you add multiple testing environments and applications, and allows logged in users to create a reservation for testing apps in the specified testing environment for a period of time.

Web sockets are used to facilitate real-time updates when users reserve or release an environment

Feature in the work is to add support for multiple teams, where a team can own a set of environments and applications.

Configuration

Each environment has its corresponding settings in config/{environment}.exs file. Your base application configuration lives in config/config.exs. Anything inside this file can be overridden by your environment specific settings.

Development

I use PostgreSQL for data persistence in both development and production environments. The database authentication can be setup in config/dev.exs for running the app locally in development. Argonaut uses the following development defaults:

# config/dev.exs
config :argonaut, Argonaut.Repo,
  adapter: Ecto.Adapters.Postgres,
  database: "argonaut",
  username: "developer",
  password: "banana2017!",
  hostname: "localhost",
  pool_size: 10

To start the app:

• Install dependencies with mix deps.get
• Create and migrate your database with mix ecto.create && mix ecto.migrate
• Install Node.js dependencies with npm install
• Start Phoenix endpoint with mix phoenix.server

Now you can visit localhost:4000 from your browser.

Production Deployment

Please check the Phoenix deployment guides for better documentation. However, following is how the app is setup in heroku currently.

Make sure heroku toolbelt is installed on your system. This is easy if you are using homebrew on macOS. If you are using Linux, you know what to do ;)

brew install heroku
heroku login

Instead of hard-coding secret keys and database credentials, config/prod.exs gets the following environment variables from heroku instance.

DATABASE_URL
GUARDIAN_JWK
POOL_SIZE
SECRET_KEY_BASE

Add elixir buildpack for heroku:

heroku create --buildpack "https://github.com/HashNuke/heroku-buildpack-elixir.git"

Add buildpack to compile the static assets:

heroku buildpacks:add https://github.com/gjaldon/heroku-buildpack-phoenix-static.git

Enable PostgreSQL:

# this will setup the database and add DATABASE_URL environment
# variable to the application dyno
heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev

Push code to heroku:

git push heroku master

Setup database pool size and run mix tasks:

heroku config:set POOL_SIZE=18
heroku config:set SECRET_KEY_BASE="`mix phoenix.gen.secret`"
heroku config:set GUARDIAN_JWK="something_secret"
heroku run "POOL_SIZE=2 mix Argonaut.task"
heroku run "POOL_SIZE=2 mix ecto.migrate"
# add environment variables for dyno metadata
heroku labs:enable runtime-dyno-metadata

Caveats

This application is under heavy development so expect to see a lot of bugs. These will mostly manifest in the front-end react.js code. Most notably, the mix of AJAX and websockets needs to be straightened out as well as few obvious refactorings and performance optimizations.

TODO

• Render reservations
• Allow users to reserve and release environments
• Allow team creation
• Allow team admins to delete owned teams
• Allow team admins to create new applications
• Allow team admins to delete owned applications
• Allow team admins to edit owned applications
• Allow team admins to create new environments
• Allow team admins to delete owned environments
• Allow team admins to edit owned environments
• Allow user login
• Allow user signup
• Allow user password resets

Credits

Logo: Viking Ship by Andrejs Kirma from the Noun Project

Images: Subtle Patterns

Assets used with CC attribution