@amagaki/amagaki-plugin-preview

amagaki-plugin-preview

An experimental plugin for Amagaki that facilitates content previews.

Features include:

• Content fetching: Fetches content from GitHub. Content updates are available without rebuilding the site.
• Live rebuilding: Rebuilds static content and deploys it as needed to a static server.

Continuous deployment

Configuration on GitHub Actions

Initial tenant setup

• Visit the Service Accounts page: https://console.cloud.google.com/iam-admin/serviceaccounts
• Download a JSON key for the Compute Engine default service account.
• Encode the service account key:

openssl base64 -in <file>.json  | pbcopy

• Paste the result into a GitHub Secret named GCP_SA_KEY.
• Create a GitHub Secret called GH_TOKEN that has a GitHub token (i.e. a Personal Access Token) of an account that has read access to your repo. NOTE: This requirement will be abandoned in a future version as we can authenticate via GitHub Actions' built-in token instead.

Per-project configuration

• Copy into your repository:

• .github/workflows/deploy-preview-server.yml
  • Set GCP_PROJECT_ID and SITE variables.
• Dockerfile
• Makefile.preview

• Install the preview plugin:

npm install --save @amagaki/amagaki-plugin-preview

import { PreviewPlugin } from '@amagaki/amagaki-plugin-preview';

export default function (pod: Pod) {
    PreviewPlugin.register(pod);
}

Proxy server

Cloud Run instances

• All preview servers are deployed to their own Cloud Run instances
• There is one Cloud Run instance per site per branch
• Cloud Run instances are deployed for every frontend code change (not content)
• All Cloud Run instances do not allow unauthenticated traffic
• Each instance is deployed with labels that identify the instance within the GCP project

Routing requests to backends

A central proxy server is deployed one time only, which provides:

• Authenication
• Clean URLs
• Routing to individual Cloud Run instances

Unauthenticated traffic is permitted to the instance, and the instance authorizes requests within the application.

Requests to the proxy invoke a lookup of the Cloud Run instance, mapping its hostname to labels written when it was deployed. For example, using https://site--main.instance.com:

preview-server=true
preview-site=site
preview-branch-token=main

If no instance at all is found, show an error message that explains the Cloud Run instance hasn't been deployed yet. If a base instance is found (i.e. against the main or master branch), yet no branch instance is found, the request will be served by the main instance. This facilitates instant previews of branches without requiring a the Cloud Run instance to be deployed first.

Once the lookup occurs and once an instance has been found, the result is cached to a file on the proxy's filesystem. Because the filesystem is ephemeral, the lookup result is only cached as long as the file remains. If a backend is not found given a hostname, the result is not cached.

The proxy server is deployed once per tenant or orgnaization. It is deployed on Google App Engine in order to support wildcard subdomains.