At nonfiction we’re building a platform to help deploy simple sites for our clients. The platform is called Handbill, under the scenes it’s using Harp and octohost.
We were working on trying to make sure that the deploys were happening quicker than they were - 30-40 seconds was just too long.
Docker works on the concept of layers (which maxed out at 42 for AUFS - until yesterday’s Docker 0.7.2 release which upped the limit to 127 - wahoo!) and containers - we were deploying with these containers:
Ubuntu Saucy -> octohost/nodejs -> final website
The “final website” had the Harp software and the client’s pages and not much else - but it needed one final step before it launched:
npm install
This final step installed a large number of node modules - it took anywhere from 30-40 seconds and pretty frequently failed due to npn issues.
We tried some caching options - which took the time down to 15-25 seconds - but it was still too long.
So I had an idea to add a 4th container that did nothing but copy the node modules needed to deploy our app - here’s the dockerfile for that:
FROM octohost/nodejs
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y curl && curl -s http://handbill-cache.handbill.io/harp/0.8/node_modules.tgz --output /root/node_modules.tgz
It just grabs the modules we pre-compiled and gets them into the container.
The next Dockerfile installs them like this:
FROM octohost/handbill-harp-caching-layer
ADD . /srv/www/
RUN cd /srv/www; tar -zxf /root/node_modules.tgz
EXPOSE 5000
CMD cd /srv/www; /usr/bin/node server.js
This took what was 15-25 seconds with caching and 30-40 natively down to a consistent 3 seconds.
I love it - it’s simple and crazy fast now.