We’ve been working on speeding up our Docker deploys over the last little while. We took deploys of a simple Harp site from 40 seconds to approximately 3 using this method - but we were still running the Harp server.
The Harp server took approximately 20-30MB of RAM at version 0.8 - but had balooned to approximately 60-80MB at version 0.11. We wanted to use the newer Harp, but tripling the memory usage was a bit of a problem.
While chatting yesterday, Jody recommended we look at harp compile which had totally skipped my mind - in about an hour of testing and tweaking, we created a new Dockerfile for our Harp base container:
FROM octohost/nodejs
RUN npm install harp -g
RUN add-apt-repository -y ppa:nginx/stable
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get -y install nginx
RUN mkdir /srv/www
ADD default /etc/nginx/sites-available/default
ADD nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
EXPOSE 80
CMD nginx
This installs Harp and Nginx and as a last step ADDs the proper config files for nginx.
Then, in the Harp repository, we add this simple Dockerfile:
FROM octohost/harp-nginx
WORKDIR /srv/www
ADD . /srv/www/
RUN harp compile
EXPOSE 80
CMD nginx
Deploys now:
- Use nginx as the web server.
- Use only 6MB of memory - down from 60MB.
- Take approximately 10 seconds. (Up from 3-6 - will try and find speedups here as well.)
That’s a win in my books.
You can grab the source to our base container here or just docker pull octohost/harp-nginx.
To see a working Harp site - take a look here for the source and here for the running site.