Preparing for Deployment

Once you have installed Pushkin (Starting a Pushkin Project), made a quiz running locally (Creating a Quiz), and setup AWS (Set Up AWS) you’re ready to deploy to the web.

Run:

pushkin prep
pushkin compile
pushkin build all
pushkin sync all

to prep, build, and push all files online. This may take a few minutes. Once it’s done, run pushkin make compose to create a Docker compose file without any environment variables that includes your custom quiz workers, suitable for use with Rancher. The file generated will be called ‘docker-compose.production.noEnvDependency.yml’ by default, or whatever you’ve set pushkin_docker_compose_noDep_file to.

Deploying Pushkin Locally

Once you’ve gone through the process of creating and compiling a quiz, you can proceed to locally deploy Pushkin, in order to freely develop and test quizzes and other site features.

First, run pushkin start to start Pushkin locally.

Now, we need to seed the database for any quizzes which we wish to test or develop. Run docker ps and find the name of the DB worker container, which is ‘db-worker_1’ by default.

CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND                CREATED         STATUS         PORTS             NAMES

be3c744c9a81        pushkin_db-worker   "bash start.debug.sh"  23 hours ago    Up 23 hours                      pushkin_db-worker_1

Now, copy that container name and run docker exec -it [name] bash to get a shell inside the DB worker Docker container. Type npm run migrations to run the migrations, then npm run seed to populate the database with your seeds. Type exit to return to your normal shell.

Caution

If you have multiple quizzes and have added data to a table in the database that a seed file corresponds to, be aware that seeding removes all data in the table before beginning. Make sure to first delete the files inside the seeds folder of the db-worker container that you don’t want to run.

We’re almost done. The last step is to find your server container. Run docker ps again, and this time look for the server container.

CONTAINER ID        IMAGE            COMMAND                CREATED       STATUS         PORTS                   NAMES

1744091332f1        pushkin_server   "nginx -g 'daemon ..." 24 hours ago  Up 7 seconds   0.0.0.0:54328->80/tcp   pushkin_server_1

This time, we’re most interested in the port. Select the port which points to 80/tcp. In this example, this is port 54328. You may now open a browser, and enter http://localhost:[Port Number] to access the local deployment of Pushkin.

All done! The quiz has been made, its assigned database tables properly seeded, and the Pushkin platform is up and running.

For more information on the key parts of a Pushkin quiz, see Foundational Quiz Components.