Riff-Raff

"Deploy the transit beam"

About

The Guardian's scala-based deployment system is designed to automate deploys by providing a web application that performs and records deploys, as well as providing various integration points for automating deployment pipelines.

Requirements

Riff-Raff and Magenta have been built with the tools we use at the Guardian and you will find it easiest if you use a similar set of tools. Riff-Raff:

• relies on artifacts and riff-raff.yaml files describing builds being in S3 buckets with the artifacts having paths of the form project-name/build-number
• uses the AWS SDK and Prism to do resource discovery
• stores configuration, history and logs in a PostgreSQL database and a handful of DynamoDB tables (the eventual aim is to ditch DynamoDB altogether)

Documentation

The documentation is available in the application (under the Documentation menu) but can also be viewed under riff-raff/app/docs in github.

In action

Screenshots don't do a lot to show how Riff-Raff works in practice - but here are a handful anyway, just to give a hint.

The deploy history view - this shows all deploys that have ever been done (in this case filtered on PROD and projects containing 'mobile')

This is what a single deploy looks like - displaying the overall result and the list of tasks that were executed.

The simple form for requesting a deploy can be seen here (further options are available after previewing)

Riff-Raff polls our build server frequently and can be configured to automatically start a deploy for newly completed builds

How do I run Riff-Raff locally if I want to hack on it?

Assuming you have a reasonably recent version of Java installed,

• Create a basic configuration file at ~/.gu/riff-raff.conf (S3 and postgres config is probably the minimum)
• Run ./script/start from the project root (add --debug to attach a remote debugger on port 9999)
• Visit http://localhost:9000/
• Details of how to configure Riff-Raff can then be found at http://localhost:9000/docs/riffraff/properties

What is still left to do?

See the TODO.txt file in this project