Pre-release testing

Prior to deploying a Fragalysis Stack build to the production Kubernetes namespace you are first required to deploy the proposed build to the staging namespace.

This will give you an opportunity to test the application in a production-like deployment (using the media and database content from the production namespace).

Deploying to pre-release (staging)

Detailed steps, and flowchart (below).

You will need access to: -

• The fragalysis-stack GitHub repository

• The production cluster AWX server

1. Tag

Trigger a Fragalysis Stack build by tagging the fragalysis-stack repository with a pre-release tag. Use Semantic Versioning where a pre-release tag should be denoted by appending a hyphen and a series of dot separated identifiers immediately following the patch version. Examples: 2.6.6-alpha.1, 2.6.6-beta.1 2.6.6-rc.1

Note

You will need to use the tag you have chosen in the START/CHANGE AWX Job Template you decide to run next…

2. Sync and/or deploy

Decide if you need to re-synchronise the staging stack with the current production data.

• If you need to synchronise, you need to shutdown the existing stack and restart it (synchronising database and media files) using the STOP and START playbooks shown in the flowchart below. This will take approximately 10 minutes.

• If you do not need to synchronise you can simply deploy the tagged stack image over the existing deployment using CHANGE AWX Job Template shown in the flowchart below

Warning

Whether you synchronise or not you MUST provide the tag of the build that you want to deploy in either the START or CHANGE template (by using it for the stack_image_tag variable in the corresponding Job Template’s EXTRA VARIABLES block)

3. Test

With the stack deployed you can now execute any testing you see fit.

Flowchart reminder

Promoting to production

Once you are happy with the build you can promote the image to production by re-tagging the fragalysis stack repository (using the same commit) using a non-pre-release tag, e.g. 2.6.6, any tag that contains Major, Minor and Patch values only.