Deployment Options

There are a few ways to use the deploy command from the Command-line Interface that we haven’t looked at until this point. In this tutorial we will look at those, to make sure you have a good idea of the options you have available.

Note

Always remember the --help option. It can be used with each command as well as the whole mvi command-line app to get a description of what options you have. If you are unsure how and what-for a certain command is used, it should be your go-to option.

MVI supports three separate service sources; A local source (directory or tarball), a git repository or a container image. By default deploy will expect a local source and to deploy from another source you need to add a flag with your deploy command:

Long Option	Short option
–git	-g
–image	-i

Note

MVI uses Source-To-Image to automatically convert source code into container images. There are advanced options that can be specified in s2i/ and .s2iignore to tailor the containerization to your service.

Git Repository

The --git option is used to deploy an onlie git repository. It is functionally identical to deploying from a local directory and have the same requirements on the contents of the service. To deploy a service from a public git repository:

>>> mvi deploy my_service 1.0.0 --git https://github.com/sclorg/django-ex 
Active host: http://your-host
Deploying service...
Service deployed successfully
MAIN    NAME        VERSION    STATUS    RUNNING
------  ----------  ---------  --------  -----------------------------------
*       my_service  1.0.0      running   Running (since 2020-11-23 16:56:06)

For a private git repository, access credentials of some sort is needed. For Github, this comes down to creating a Personal Access Token (PAT) and using it like so:

>>> mvi deploy my_service 1.0.0 --git https://USERNAME:TOKEN@github.com/me/private_repository 
Active host: http://your-host
Deploying service...
Service deployed successfully
MAIN    NAME        VERSION    STATUS    RUNNING
------  ----------  ---------  --------  -----------------------------------
*       my_service  1.0.0      running   Running (since 2020-11-23 16:56:06)

Container Image

The --image option can be used to deploy any container image as an MVI service. This can be useful for deploying applications that are not written using the SDK within the MVI framework. Keep in mind that most pre-build images will not support the automatic interactive documentation:

>>> mvi deploy --image my_service2 1.0.0 traefik/whoami --port 80 
Active host: http://your-host
Deploying service...
Service deployed successfully
MAIN    NAME         VERSION    STATUS    RUNNING
------  -----------  ---------  --------  -----------------------------------
*       my_service2  1.0.0      running   Running (since 2020-11-23 16:57:55)

In the last command we used an optional argument to change the internal port of the service container. This is not required when deploying services locally or from git repositories, but it might be necessary when deploying from an image.

Advanced Deployment of Docker Images

Extra key: value arguments (beyond port number and environment variables) needed for the docker image to run properly can be specified when deploying the image via the /~image POST HTTP endpoint. These extra key: value arguments should be specified under the docker_run_args key in the request data field. The accepted parameters for docker run which can be found here.

For instance, a docker image that requires privileged mode to run properly can be deployed like (using pythons request library):

requests.post(
    url='http://your-host/~image,
    headers=<headers>,
    data = {
        'image': <image>,
        'name': <name>,
        'version': <version>,
        'port': <port>,
        'docker_run_args': {
            'privileged': True,
            ...
        }
    })

Ignoring Files when Deploying

Sometimes not all the contents of a service have to be included when the service is deployed. Common exceptions can include test folders and configuration files. To exclude a file or a folder from being deployed you can specify their path in .s2iignore. By default, the .git/ and test/ directories are excluded because they do not contribute to the functionality of a service.