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Cloud deployment

You can deploy Neverkin to a cloud provider of your choice. Some common providers are:

The pricing will differ depending on the provider, but for a small 24/7 cluster you can expect to pay around $10/month.

For full functionality, you will need the following:

  • A virtual machine (called a droplet, an EC2 instance, etc.) with support for Docker Swarm and Node.js.
  • Two managed storage volumes:
    • A larger one (5+ GB) holds the main database
    • The smallest one you can provision holds the secrets and SSL certificates
  • (Optional) A domain name
    • Depending on your cloud provider, you may get a working link without a domain name
  • (Optional) An S3 bucket for asset and backup storage

Volumes

Section titled “Volumes”
  • Create and mount the following volumes onto the manager-1 node:
    • /mnt/volume_rhea_postgres
    • /mnt/volume_secrets
      • Mount them under different names and create symlinks to those locations

S3

Section titled “S3”
  • Set up a new Spaces bucket through the UI and grab a new access token.
  • Set up the CORS policy in the UI.
  • Install AWS CLI on the manager-1 node:
    • apt install awscli
  • Set up credentials:
    • aws configure:
AWS Access Key ID [None]: [...]
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: [...]
Default region name [None]: fra1
Default output format [None]: json

Secrets

Section titled “Secrets”

  • Specify the environment secret

    • All deployments are considered to be “production”
    • echo "production" | docker secret create environment -

  • Generate a JWT auth key, place it into /mnt/volume_secrets/keys/jwt-secret.txt

    • Just the key without formatting or anything

  • Register the key as a secret

    • docker secret create jwt-secret /mnt/volume_secrets/keys/jwt-secret.txt

  • Configure S3 storage using the access key from the previous step

    • echo "BUCKET_ID" | docker secret create s3-bucket-id -
    • echo "https://fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com" | docker secret create s3-endpoint -
    • echo "..." | docker secret create s3-access-key-id -
    • echo "..." | docker secret create s3-access-key-secret -

  • (Optional) Create a contact form webhook url secret

    • echo "your-webhook" | docker secret create webhook-contact-form-url -

  • (Optional) Create a Gemini image generation API key secret

    • echo "your-api-key" | docker secret create imagen-google-api-key -

Set up the app

Section titled “Set up the app”
  • Clone the Neverkin repository
    • cd ~
    • git clone git@github.com:Tenebrie/neverkin.git
    • cd neverkin
  • Switch to desired branch
    • git checkout dev
      • The deployed app version is not dependent on the selected branch, but the migrations are pulled from Git. Attempting to deploy a version with mismatched migrations will probably break things.
  • Init Swarm cluster
    • docker swarm init
  • Deploy the app
    • VERSION=v1.2.3 ./scripts/stack-update.sh
  • Run migrations
    • ./scripts/stack-migrate.sh
  • Create Chronos storage folders
    • mkdir -p /mnt/volume_rhea_postgres/backrest/{data,config,cache}

Log in to the app

Section titled “Log in to the app”
  • Open the app in your browser
  • Log in as administrator
    • Username: admin@localhost
    • Password: q
  • I recommend changing the default password or deleting the default user after giving your own user account admin privileges through the Admin section.