Deployment#

This page covers production deployment of the application as well as common database operations needed during deploys and migrations.

Deploying with Docker Compose#

The recommended deployment uses the prebuilt Docker image n1cz/richy:nightly. The repository ships a ready-to-use compose.yaml.skel file in the project root.

Copy the templates into place and edit them:

$ cp .env.skel .env
$ cp compose.yaml.skel compose.yaml
$ cp nginx.conf.skel nginx.conf

Pull the latest image:
```
$ docker pull n1cz/richy:nightly
```
Bring the stack up:
```
$ docker compose up -d
```
Load the predefined admin user (only on a fresh database):
```
$ docker exec -it richy ./manage.py loaddata users
```
Default credentials are admin@test.com / test – change them right after the first login.

The compose.yaml.skel runs five core services: richy (gunicorn), beat (celery beat), worker, worker_slow, worker_fast, plus redis, db (Postgres) and nginx. See Tasks for details on the worker queues.

Environment variables#

Required environment variables come from .env. The minimum set is listed in Local setup; the full reference is in Settings.

Manual production image build#

Same image as CI builds:

$ docker build -t n1cz/richy:nightly .

Database dump#

To dump the database use following command (which also bzip the dump):

# (no news_news table)
$ docker exec -it richy-db pg_dump -T news_news -U postgres richy | bzip2 -9f > /tmp/dump.sql.bz2
# (full dump)
$ docker exec -it richy-db pg_dump -U postgres richy | bzip2 -9f > /tmp/dump.sql.bz2

Transfer from a VPS to local and unzip the dump to current directory:

$ rsync vps:/tmp/dump.sql.bz2 /tmp ; bzip2 -df /tmp/dump.sql.bz2 -c > dump.sql

Loading a dump assumes the compose file mounts the dump file as - ./dump.sql:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/dump.sql under the database volumes. Recreate the db container to trigger the bootstrap import:

$ docker rm richy-db; dcd up db

To load the dump manually:

$ docker cp dump.sql richy-db:/tmp/dump.sql
$ docker exec richy-db psql -U postgres -f /tmp/dump.sql

To run dump, transfer and load in one command:

$ ssh vps "docker exec richy-db pg_dump -U postgres richy | bzip2 -9f > /tmp/dump.sql.bz2" \
    ; rsync vps:/tmp/dump.sql.bz2 /tmp \
    ; bzip2 -df /tmp/dump.sql.bz2 -c > dump.sql \
    ; docker rm richy-db; dcd up db

Updating an existing deployment#

$ docker pull n1cz/richy:nightly
$ docker compose up -d

The application doesn’t ship breaking changes. When it does, release notes describe the migration path – watch the GitLab releases page.