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Deploy your stacks

Deploy your stacks

You can also deploy your own stack. Create a new stack with lostdock stacks create and then edit the .env file to configure the hostname.

lostdock stacks create --name example
cd example

The example folder contains a basic example of an Nginx web server to get started. You can add more services to the stack using your own images later.

.env file

The .env file is a convention to store environment variables. Docker Compose automatically reads this file and allows you to interpolate the values directly in the docker-compose.yml file, which is a powerful feature.

Now, let's edit the hostname for the service to something that you control. Don't forget to point DNS A records to the public IP address of your server.

.env
# This file is used to store environment variables for the stack.
# It is not checked into source control.
# You can use the environment variables in your docker-compose.yml file.
 
# The domain name for the stack. Used in the docker-compose.yml service traefik configuration.
HOST="example.lostdock.com"

docker-compose.yml file

Review the docker-compose.yml file. It contains the configuration for the stack. You can add more services to the stack.

docker-compose.yml
version: "3.9"
 
networks:
  # Network where traefik reverse proxy is running
  proxy:
    external: true
 
services:
  # Simple web service. It uses lostdock-traefik for the dynamic reverse proxy with automated TLS          certificates.
  whoami:
    image: "nginx"
    volumes:
      - ./src:/usr/share/nginx/html
 
    # Expose the environment variables to your service
    env_file:
      - ./.env
 
    # Always restart the container if it fails
    restart: always
    # We can change the amount of containers running at the same time
    deploy:
      mode: replicated
      replicas: 1
      endpoint_mode: vip
 
    # We need to add the service to the traefik network
    networks:
      - proxy
 
    # Traefik configuration is fetched dynamically from the labels of other running containers
    labels:
      - traefik.enable=true
      # Don't forget to add an A record pointing to the server IP address to your DNS.
      - traefik.http.routers.example.rule=Host(`${HOST}`)
      - traefik.http.routers.example.service=example
      - traefik.http.routers.example.entrypoints=websecure
      - traefik.http.routers.example.tls=true
      - traefik.http.routers.example.tls.certresolver=letsencrypt
      - traefik.http.services.example.loadbalancer.server.port=80

Install the stack:

lostdock stacks install

It will perform the following actions:

  • Run ./install-local.sh (validate configuration)
  • Push stack configuration files to server
  • Run ./install-server.sh (preparation before starting stack. E.g. change permissions, create volumes, networks, etc)
  • Run docker compose up.

Deploying your own images

You can sign up to DockerHub and push your own images to the registry. You can also use a private registry (paid feature). We might consider adding a free private registry in the future.

Your images could be built on your CI/CD (e.g. GitHub Actions) and pushed to the registry. You can also build the images on the server using docker build and docker push.

Updating your stack

Store a IMAGE_TAG environment variable in the .env file.

The docker-compose.yml service image can contain an environment variable to be used as a template. The image tag will be replaced with the value of the environment variable.

docker-compose.yml
...
services:
  example:
    image: "myorg/example:${IMAGE_TAG}"
...

You can update the stack by running:

lostdock stacks env set --stack example --key IMAGE_TAG --value 1.0.0
lostdock stacks up --stack example

CI/CD example

Checkout the GitHub Actions workflow (opens in a new tab) we use to deploy these docs:

In a gist, the workflow is setting up the SSH key, building the Docker image, and pushing it to DockerHub registry. Then we run the following commands to deploy the latest version of the stack.

cd ./apps/docs/deployments/production
npm i -g lostdock
lostdock login --host lostdock.com --privateKeyPath ~/.ssh/id_rsa
lostdock stacks env pull --silent
lostdock stacks env set --local --key HOSTNAME --value lostdock.com
lostdock stacks env set --local --key VERSION --value ${{ env.VERSION }}
lostdock stacks env set --local --key ENV --value production
lostdock stacks push
lostdock stacks up

However, you can use any CI/CD tool you want, or any set of commands to deploy your stack.

lostdock-portainerStack management basics