Billy Gin 🍶

Seamless blue/green deployment based on Nginx Proxy Manager.

Blue/Green deployment

🤔 How to roll a new version of an app without any downtime? Blue/Green deployment is a deployment workflow where you have 2 independent app containers.

💭 Imagine you have an API api.example.com. With Blue/Green workflow you start with the following configuration:

🟢	🔵
api.example.com	api-stage.example.com
v1.0.0	v1.0.0
Container A	Container B

Your production uses api.example.com so it must have 0 downtime. Otherwise, api-stage.example.com is only for internal usage, so it doesn't matter if there is any downtime.

You roll out an update (v1.0.1) to the container B. If it's required, it's safe to restart it, shut down etc. Your current configuration looks like this:

🟢	🔵
api.example.com	api-stage.example.com
v1.0.0	v1.0.1
Container A	Container B

After you spin up and tested a new version (remember, you can still access it via api-stage.example.com) just swap gateways of Green and Blue hosts:

🟢	🔵
api.example.com	api-stage.example.com
v1.0.1	v1.0.0
Container B	Container A

🎉 Done. You have deployed a new udpate with 0 downtime.

Usage

Do a POST /toggle request with Authorization header:

Authorization: Bearer supersecret

That's it. You have seamlessly swapped two containers.

Also you'd be interested in following endpoints:

• GET /blue - get current blue proxy info
• GET /green - get current green proxy info

Setup

❗️ Before start:

This is an "add-on" for the Nginx Proxy Manager. If you do not use it this project isn't suitable for you.

I really recommend you to see the original project. It's a handy tool which makes DevOps much easier ✨

📝 Service account

BillyGin needs a service account to work. You can create it under Users > Add users in the Nginx Proxy Manager UI.

If you don't want to give admin rights, select Manage role for all Proxy hosts.

Then, set a password for the created user (three dots, Change password).

🟢🔵 Green and Blue containers

To make possible for BillyGin to operate with proxy hosts it's required to create those hosts first.

Do it as usual under Proxy hosts. Create records for green and blue hosts.

Example:

• Green host:

  • Domain: api.example.com
  • Forward hostname: api_a

• Blue host:

  • Domain: api-stage.example.com
  • Forward hostname: api_b

🌲 Environment variables

BillyGin is using environment variables to configure itself. You can pass them via .env file.

PORT=3000
HOST="0.0.0.0"

NGINX_PROXY_MANAGER_URL=http://proxy:81
NGINX_PROXY_MANAGER_SA_EMAIL="[email protected]"
NGINX_PROXY_MANAGER_SA_SECRET="somesecret"

GREEN_DOMAIN=api.example.com
BLUE_DOMAIN=api-stage.example.com

A_FORWARD_HOST=api_a
B_FORWARD_HOST=api_b

SECRET="anothersecret"

• NGINX_PROXY_MANAGER_URL - instance of Nginx Proxy Manager
• NGINX_PROXY_MANAGER_SA_EMAIL - email of created service account (user)
• NGINX_PROXY_MANAGER_SA_SECRET - password of created service account
• GREEN_DOMAIN - "production" domain (without protocol or slashes)
• BLUE_DOMAIN - "staging" domain (same rules)
• A_FORWARD_HOST - A container host (without port, protocol] or slashes)
• B_FORWARD_HOST - B container host (same rules)
• SECRET - service key to sign requests (any string you want)

All listed variables are required.

🖥️ Run natively

Prerequisites

• 🚀 NodeJS v18

Clone this repo. Create .env file with configurations. Run following commands:

npm i
npm run build
npm start

🐳 Docker compose

Prerequisites

• 🐳 Docker (compose)

Create a docker-compose.yml file with the following contents:

version: "3"
services:
  billy-gin:
    container_name: billy-gin
    image: "mrfullset/billy-gin:latest"
    env_file:
      - .env

Put .env file near to docker-compose.yml. Run:

docker compose up -d

☝️ Recomendations

If you use a proxy host to Nginx Proxy Manager itself, it's a good idea to add BillyGin as Custom location to its record, so you don't need to register a separate domain for it or expose ports from Docker. Example settings:

• Location: /billy-gin/
• Forward hostname: billy-gin/.

Preserve slashes as they are in the example