"Deploy the transit beam"

The Guardian's scala-based deployment system is designed to automate deploys by providing a web application that performs and records deploys, as well as providing various integration points for automating deployment pipelines.

Riff-Raff and Magenta have been built with the tools we use at the Guardian and you will find it easiest if you use a similar set of tools. Riff-Raff:

• relies on artifacts and build.json files describing builds being in S3 buckets with the artifacts having paths of the form project-name/build-number
• uses the AWS SDK and Prism to do resource discovery
• stores configuration, history and logs in a MongoDB instance and a handful of DynamoDB tables (the eventual aim is to ditch Mongo altogether)

The documentation is available in the application (under the Documentation menu) but can also be viewed under riff-raff/app/docs in github.

Screenshots don't do a lot to show how Riff-Raff works in practice - but here are a handful anyway, just to give a hint.

The deploy history view - this shows all deploys that have ever been done (in this case filtered on PROD and projects containing 'mobile')

This is what a single deploy looks like - displaying the overall result and the list of tasks that were executed.

The simple form for requesting a deploy can be seen here (further options are available after previewing)

Riff-Raff polls our build server frequently and can be configured to automatically start a deploy for newly completed builds

Assuming you have a reasonably recent version of Java installed,

• Create a basic configuration file at ~/.gu/riff-raff.properties (S3 and mongo config is probably the minimum)
• Run the sbt script
• enter project riffraff at the SBT prompt
• enter run at the SBT prompt
• visit http://localhost:9000/
• Details of how to configure Riff-Raff can then be found at http://localhost:9000/docs/riffraff/properties

See the TODO.txt file in this project