Welcome to tech team! This is a quick introduction to Beehive, our custom infrastructure automation system. By the end of this tutorial, you'll have your very own website hosted on our cluster to showcase your memes to the world!

Let's get started!

Make a branch of this code named with your first name.

On the command line, this can be done with the git branch command. For example, I would run git branch ehsan. Then, checkout your new branch with git checkout <branchname>.

Add any memes you want to host on the site to your branch. Then, create an index.html file and embed your memes/styling. This index.html will be loaded when users visit the root path of your site.

Docker is a container system for our applications. Each Docker container can be thought of as a lightweight virtual machine, which comes with the application and all it's dependencies built in.

Docker containers must first be built. The build process is where we specify how to run our application and tell Docker what dependencies to include. At the root directory of each of our repositories is a Dockerfile, which uses Docker-specific scripting lanaguage to define how the Docker container is built. For this tutorial, we'll keep it simple.

Create a Dockerfile with the following contents and commit to your branch:

FROM hackgt/nginx
COPY . /usr/share/nginx/html/

The first line tells us to inherit a pre-built container called nginx. The rest of our Docker commands will run ontop of this pre-built container. The nginx container is a web server that simply serves anything located in /usr/share/nginx/html/ on port 80. So, the second line tells Docker to copy all of our files (meme images and index.html) from our local machine into /usr/share/nginx/html/ in the virtual container.

At the root of each of our applications there's a deployment.yaml. This contains options related to deployment into our cluster. For now, we only need to specify that our application will be listening on port 80, since that's what the nginx image we inherited from above uses.

Created a file called deployment.yaml with the follow contents and commit it to your branch:

target_port: 80 

Now you're ready to get your ducks in a row and push to GitHub!

Add all the files you want to commit to the staging area:

git add <file one> <file two> ...

Check to see that all the changes you want to commit are written in green in:

git status

Commit everything:

git commit -m 'My commit message here!'

Finally, push:

git push origin <branch name>

If your push failed, make sure your in-sync with GitHub by pulling any possibly new changes:

git pull -r origin <branch name>

That's all you need to build an application in our cluster! Let's discuss deployment.

Beehive is our repository for managing deployments of our applications. Each yaml file in the repository corresponds to an application hosted on a subdomain of hack.gt. For example, registration.yaml specifies the file to be hosted on registration.hack.gt and dev/registration.yaml specifies the application hosted on registration.dev.hack.gt.

To deploy your application, created a yaml file with your name in the memes/ folder. This will be deployed to <yourname>.memes.hack.gt. In the yaml file, we simply specify the git url and branch of our application.

Create the file memes/<yourname>.yaml with the following content:

 git:
    remote: https://github.com/HackGT/memes.git
    branch: <branch_you_made_earlier>

Once you push this file to the Beehive repository, Beehive will immediately begin deploying your website. In a few minutes, you should see it live at yourname.memes.hack.gt!