Deploy Chartbrew on your server

INFO

With time, this guide will be updated with more ways of deploying. Any PR is welcome!

Building the app

Follow the Getting Started guide to set up the project somewhere on your server.

Please note that you have to set all the production environmental variables in this case.

Keep in mind that the tools used in this guide are used as an example but they work really well. There might be multiple other tools that you can use, so feel free to do so if you wish.

Serving the app

This guide is tried and tested with Ubuntu. The settings should be the same on all operating systems, but some of the files and commands may vary.

Backend

The backend doesn't need to undergo a build process. You need the following things to make sure it can be served:

• MySQL running
• A database is created so that Chartbrew can use it (it must be empty if it wasn't used by Chartbrew before)
• npm install ran in the server folder or npm run setup in the project root folder
• Environmental variables are set for Production (check .env-template in the root folder to see which)

Once all these are checked, we can either run npm run start, or use an external tool like pm2 to monitor and manage Node apps better.

npm install -g pm2

# starting the app in production
cd chartbrew/server
NODE_ENV=production pm2 start index.js --name "chartbrew-server"

You can also start pm2 as a cluster to take advantage of your server's multi-threading capabilities and 0-downtime reloads. If you wish to do this, replace the last command above with:

NODE_ENV=production pm2 start index.js --name "chartbrew-server" -i max

This will then run the server on the port specified in server/settings.js.

Frontend

The Frontend app needs to be built and then served using pm2 like above.

# build the app
cd chartbrew/client
npm run build

Create the pm2 configuration file:

vim app.config.json

{
  apps : [
    {
      name: "cbc-client",
      script: "npm",
      interpreter: "none",
      args: "run preview"
    }
  ]
}

Now you can start the front-end app with pm2 start app.config.json

Using the methods above, the app can be accessed on localhost. To serve it on a domain, continue reading on.

Run the application with Docker

WARNING

The setup is not yet updated for PostgreSQL. Please open a PR or a new issue if you have a solution or encounter any problems that can help us with the support.

A Chartbrew docker image is built whenever a new version is released.

Before running the commands below, make sure you have a MySQL server already running and an empty database that Chartbrew can use. The database name should match the value of the CB_DB_NAME variable.

You will need a 32 bytes AES encryption key for the CB_ENCRYPTION_KEY variable. Run the following command to generate one:

node -e "console.log(require('crypto').randomBytes(32).toString('hex'))"

docker pull razvanilin/chartbrew

docker run -p 4019:4019 -p 4018:4018 \
  -e CB_ENCRYPTION_KEY=your_32_bytes_key \
  -e CB_API_HOST=0.0.0.0 \
  -e CB_API_PORT=4019 \
  -e CB_DB_HOST=host.docker.internal \
  -e CB_DB_PORT=3306 \
  -e CB_DB_NAME=chartbrew \
  -e CB_DB_USERNAME=root \
  -e CB_DB_PASSWORD=password \
  -e CB_REDIS_HOST=host.docker.internal \
  -e CB_REDIS_PORT=6379 \
  -e CB_REDIS_PASSWORD=password \
  -e VITE_APP_CLIENT_HOST=http://localhost:4018 \
  -e VITE_APP_CLIENT_PORT=4018 \
  -e VITE_APP_API_HOST=http://localhost:4019 \
  razvanilin/chartbrew

Changing environmental variables

If you change any of the VITE_APP_* variables after the first run, it's important to build the client application again from inside the image. This is done by running the following command:

# replace 'your_container_name' with the name of your docker container where Chartbrew is running

docker exec -it -w /code/client your_container_name npm run build

Now let's analyse what is needed for the docker image to run properly.

The 4019 port is used by the API and 4018 for the client app (UI). Feel free to map these to any other ports on your system (e.g 4523:4019).

• CB_ENCRYPTION_KEY this string will be used to encrypt passwords and tokens. Use a secure 32 bytes string. You can generate one here.
• CB_API_HOST needs to point to the home address of the system. Usually for a docker image this is 0.0.0.0.
• CB_DB_HOST is the host of your database and determines how the application can reach it. host.docker.internal is used when you want the container to connect to a service on your host such as a database running on your server already.
• CB_DB_PORT is the port number of your database.
• CB_DB_NAME the name of the database (make sure the database exists before running the image).
• CB_DB_USERNAME and CB_DB_PASSWORD are used for authentication with the DB.
• CB_REDIS_HOST, CB_REDIS_PORT, and CB_REDIS_PASSWORD are used for the Redis queue.
• VITE_APP_CLIENT_HOST is the address of the client application and is used by the client to be aware of its own address (not as important)
• VITE_APP_CLIENT_PORT The port number where your client application will run from.
• VITE_APP_API_HOST this is used for the client application to know where to make the API requests. This is the address of the API (backend).

If the setup fails in any way, please double-check that the environmental variables are set correctly. Check that both API and Client apps are running, and if you can't get it running, please open a new issue with as much info as you can share (logs, vars).