manage.get.gov/docs/operations

Operations

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Some basic information and setup steps are included in this README.

Instructions for specific actions can be found in our runbooks.

Continuous Delivery

We use a cloud.gov service account to deploy from this repository to cloud.gov with a SpaceDeveloper user.

Authenticating to Cloud.gov via the command line

You'll need the Cloud Foundry CLI.

We use the V7 Cloud Foundry CLI.

cf login -a api.fr.cloud.gov --sso

After authenticating, make sure you are targeting the correct org and space!

cf spaces
cf target -o <ORG> -s <SPACE>

Database

In sandbox, created with cf create-service aws-rds micro-psql getgov-ENV-database.

Binding the database in manifest-<ENVIRONMENT>.json automatically inserts the connection string into the environment as DATABASE_URL.

Cloud.gov RDS documentation.

Deploy

We have two environments: unstable and staging. Developers can deploy locally to unstable whenever they want. However, only our CD service can deploy to staging, and it does so on every commit to main. This is to ensure that we have a "golden" environment to point to, and can still test things out in an unstable space. You should make sure all of the USWDS assets are compiled and collected before deploying to unstable. To deploy locally to unstable:

# Compile and collect the assets
docker-compose run node npx gulp compile
docker-compose run node npx gulp copyAssets
docker-compose run app ./manage.py collectstatic

# Deploy to unstable
cf target -o cisa-getgov-prototyping -s unstable
cf push getgov-unstable -f ops/manifests/manifest-unstable.yaml
cf run-task getgov-unstable --command 'python manage.py migrate' --name migrate

Alternatively, you could run the deploy.sh script in the /src directory to build the assets and deploy to unstable. Similarly, you could run build.sh script to just compile and collect the assets without deploying.

Serving static assets

We are using WhiteNoise plugin to serve our static assets on cloud.gov. This plugin is added to the MIDDLEWARE list in our apps settings.py.

Note that it’s a good idea to run collectstatic locally or in the docker container before pushing files up to unstable. This is because collectstatic relies on timestamps when deciding to whether to overwrite the existing assets in /public. Due the way files are uploaded, the compiled css in the /assets/css folder on unstable will have a slightly earlier timestamp than the files in /public/css, and consequently running collectstatic onunstable will not update public/css as you may expect. For convenience, both the deploy.sh and build.sh scripts will take care of that.