ember-cli, ember-data, restadapter: change REST host in production? - rest

I have created my REST host's address as property in
config/environment.js and use it successfully during development.
but once it should go live, the REST server may change and even during the live time of the app the REST server may change to another host.
building via
ember build -prod ...
puts the variable inside a lengthy string in idex.html and the minified and compacted app-js file, where it cannot be changed easily.
I cannot believe that, I need to re-build the whole app just to change the REST host's address.
Simple question: How to change the REST host in production easily?

Related

Change Phoenix framework process user with setgid and setuid after deploy?

We've finished our first phoenix application for internal company use and it is time now to deploy it. It will be hidden under Apache server (yep, nginx is not available as an option), and according to PCI DSS standard it should be run under readonly user. Node.js devs use some functions like this in their startup configs to change user from 'deployer' which can write to filesystem to 'runner' (readonly user) which just read the code.
So, when my app is starting up after deploy, user should be dynamically changed from 'deploy' to 'runner'. What is the best way to do it? BTW, I'm not completely understood how Cowboy works, but I guess it just runs in the background like unicorn or puma?

With firebase hosting how do I change the domain name

I have previously configured firebase hosting successfully but now want to change the domain name I am using.
It appears you can Edit the current domain name but this doesnt seem to do anything that I can see when I enter a new domain name.
Not sure how to proceed.
Thanks,
Craig.
So I sent an email to firebase support and this process involves removing your current domain and adding a new domain which involves some downtime whilst they procure a new SSL certificate, etc.
If anyone is attempting to do this and does not want to incur any downtime its not too difficult. The highlevel process I have followed to move from olddomain.com to newdomain.com without downtime is detailed below:
Procure another temp server (i.e. amazon or whatever) and bring up nginx
Deploy your static files (css, js, html, jpg, etc) to this temporary server
Procure a cert for olddomain.com and deploy it on your server. You can get some free ones for a month if you have a search (dont want to endorse any particular product here)
Ensure the site is running as olddomain.com on your temp server (hack you hosts file to force your domain name to point at the new temp server.
If all good, modify your DNS for olddomain.com so it points at your temp server.
Wait a few hours to ensure all traffic going to your temp server (look at w3c style logs to ensure traffic is coming in)
You can now safely remove your olddomain.com and setup newdomain.com under firebase hosting without losing traffic to olddomain.com
Once newdomain.com setup and running on firebase hosting, configure olddomain.com to do a redirect to newdomain.com. May want to leave this up for a while depending upon how much traffic you are expecting to olddomain.com.
Job done without any downtime :)
Hope these steps are of use to others.
Thanks.
I created a new project with the desired domain name, then switched to the new project using the firebase use <project_id> command from Firebase CLI.

AWS deployment without using SSH

I've read some articles recently on setting up AWS infrastructure w/o enabling SSH on Ec2 instances. My web app requires a binary to run. So how can I deploy my application to an ec2 instance w/o using ssh?
This was the article in question.
http://wblinks.com/notes/aws-tips-i-wish-id-known-before-i-started/
Although doable, like the article says, it requires to think about servers as ephemeral servers. A good example of this is web services that scale up and down depending on demand. If something goes wrong with one of the servers you can just terminate your server and spin up another one.
Generally, you can accomplish this using a pull model. For example at bootup pull your code from a git/mecurial repository and then execute scripts to setup your instance. The script will setup all the monitoring required to determine whether your server and application are up and running appropriately. You would still need an SSH client for this if you want to pull your code using ssh. (Although you could also do it through HTTPS)
You can also use configuration management tools that don't use ssh at all like Puppet or Chef. Essentially your node/server will pull all your application and server configuration from the Puppet master or the Chef server. The Puppet agent or Chef client would then perform all the configuration/deployment/monitoring changes for your application to run.
If you with this model I think one of the most critical components is monitoring. You need to know at all times if there's something wrong with one of your server and in the event something goes wrong discard the server and spin up a new one. (Even better if this whole process is automated)
Hope this helps.

Umbraco on Azure: can I change hostname?

I've deployed in Windows Azure a website made with Umbraco, using
Windows Azure Accelerator for Umbraco.
For development and test i used a test Hostname. Now it's time to switch to the official DNS hostname..
How can I change current hostname?
Actually i configured hostname at deployment time (the only way i know to do this) but i can't deploy again, since many files have been changed working on website on Azure.
EDIT
Let me explain: at the step prompt in the image (during web site deploying) I used as Domain Name "test.mywebsite.com", and configured real DNS.
Now the website is configured, so I'd like to make mywebsite.com point to that site;
But is'nt enough if i configure mywebsite DNS! Shall I deploy again? An will I lose any of the changes I made?
I'd like to make two comments on your question:
1) In order to host your Azure application under a custom host name, you will need to sign up with a DNS provider that supports C-NAME records (most do). I suggest someone like GoDaddy.com because by default C-NAME records can only resolve your "www.domainname.com" records and cannot do anything for queries where "www." is dropped from the URL. DNS providers like GoDaddy also have an option to redirect all traffic destined for "domainname.com" to a URL of your choice. This is a huge deal for Azure apps. Frankly speaking, it is somewhat disappointing that for all the PaaS and IaaS features of Azure, DNS was not included in the overall package.
2) I am a little worried when you say that you can no longer redeploy your app due to the changes made. Can you elaborate on that? Have you made changes to the application's code running on VM's in Azure without going through redeployment process? If so, this is a huge no-no. Your VM's running in Azure are not "permanent". Microsoft and your redeployment process can (and will) re-stage those VM's to the original package at any given time. Microsoft will re-image your VM's at least once a month during their monthly OS upgrades. But they can also do so when they need to move your VM to another rack, etc. Whatever changes that you make to your app must be either stored in source-control before deployment or in a permanent storage facility like SQL Azure, Azure Storage, etc.
HTH
Finally i think that the answers to my questions are:
-Shall I deploy again? Yes, i must deploy again
-Will I lose any of the changes I made? Many changes will be mantained since are stored into DB. But I have to do many activities to make new website work!
This answer confirms my theory:
In my case, I created and uploaded a site with a name, let's say
http://www.contoso.com and then paid a domain from a registrar let's say
http://www.example.com, when I mapped
http://MyAcceleratorsService.cloudapp.net/ to my new domain
( http://www.example.com ) and tried to open that domain I got the home page of
the Accelerator and not the uploaded site.
I had to upload the site again to Azure (using UploadUmbracoSite.cmd
from Accelerator application) and when uploading enter the same domain
name as the one I registered: http://www.example.com. Then, I was able to
browse my uploaded site as expected.
As for your question, will upload site again using
UploadUmbracoSite.cmd (is in the Setup folder) and will enter the new
domain name when requested.
Exactly what I was trying to avoid.. but the only solution, i suppose.
Well it was not easy to publish again, i got errors of many type (i suppose tied to some components that i've installed after deploy and that are not installed in new deployed website).. i'm going to solve them.
Edit
Completed my work:
- loads of different attempts, no-one worked
- CTP backup of DB
- deleted DB and website
- new full deploy of umbraco
- CTP restore of DB
finally:
-all work on content is OK
-all work on styles, pages, templates is lost
Changing hostname is hard; dont'use test hostname but definitive hostname from the beginning.
If anyone has suggest, i'll be pleased to test it, anyway
This is not really an answer to your question, but it might be a solution to your problem: Use a CNAME record to make the production DNS name point to your development name. E.g. www.productionname.com will the point to www.testname.com. I am not sure if everything will just work out of the box, but it seems to be worth a try.
This requires, that your hosting provider allows you to set up CNAME records.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNAME_record

Windows Azure production vs staging server and Facebook integration

We use Windows Azure Cloud services to host our application. One of the great features of Windows Azure is the Production/Staging model. You can have the clients of your application routed to your production server, while you can test your new code running on a staging server. For example, you can configure Azure to point a production server to http://www.coolapp.com while designating a staging server for the same app to something like this: http://7f8e9d5ba73a4f7ea9ebd65a02ee195d.cloudapp.net.
Physically both of these servers are publicly facing. If you were to know the cryptic URL of a staging server you would be able to browse to the app just as easily as you would browse to www.coolapp.com. However, the presence of a GUID in the URL makes it virtually impossible for someone to guess it, thus making the staging server "private". This gives a nice mechanism to the developers of an application to deploy and test the new bits on a staging server before releasing them to public. Once they make sure that things look good, with a flip of a switch they swap the two servers, making staging server a production server and vice versa.
This model creates a small problem for us in relation to Facebook integration. To be able to integrate Facebook plugins you have to register your app with them. FB will then issue an AppId and an AppSecret keys. These keys are tied to the URL of your application. So in order for my app to work with FB plugins I need to obtain one set of keys that is tied to 7f8e9d5ba73a4f7ea9ebd65a02ee195d.cloudapp.net, and another set that is tied to www.coolapp.com.
When I read about Windows Azure, they really urge developers to treat staging vs. production servers as the same. The only difference between them should be the URL. In other words, Azure does not recommend basing your app logic on which server the code happens to be running on as Azure has no inherent knowledge of this. Staging vs. production is just a handy "abstraction" if you will. I guess you see the problem here. In our example above, I have to use one set of keys issued by FB versus another depending on which URL (production vs. staging) my app is running at. I assume I am not the first one running into this problem. What are the correct ways of handling this? One obvious way is to sniff the URL property of the Request object and branch my logic that way. However, intuition tells me this is a hack. Any other ideas?
Regards,
Archil
The mechanisms I know of are:
using "production" within a totally separate service account to "testing" - this leaves "staging" within the production service to be used as an area for "deployment candidates" and provides a separate clean testing domain with a non-changing URL for earlier "dev and test" work.
using different .cscfg files for staging and production - and being careful to update this .cscfg before you do any live switching.
sniffing the incoming URL - as you suggest
Personally, I use the first of these techniques - its easy and it helps prevent nasty accidents
As an aside, one of the techniques we've used for "removing" the Guid from staging is to CNAME the Guid with a really short TTL on the DNS - this allows us to quickly and automatically update the CNAME record for the staging server when we deploy.