Make it easier for people to automatically deploy to the PaaS

[pgchamberlin]

The GDS Way auto-deploys (see: https://github.com/alphagov/gds-way/blob/master/.travis.yml ). We could easily add example config to do that to the .travis.yml in tech-docs-template, commented out with instructions to enable it in the README?

[J-Lambo]

Sounds like a sensible solution to me. I'm happy to help documenting that when it's in a place to do so.

[tijmenb]

Since the docs have docs now, this could be added to https://github.com/alphagov/tech-docs-manual.

[36degrees]

Note that Travis' CloudFoundry provider (which is what is being used in the GDS Way example above) does not currently provide zero downtime deploys – deploying the site will result in your documentation site disappearing (returning a json 404) for a short period whilst the old container is destroyed and the new one comes up.

This might be fine, but if the docs are public facing you might want to do something else to prevent this happening. For the Design System we use autopilot but it's rather more involved:

• https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system/blob/master/.travis.yml#L15-L19
• https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system/blob/master/.travis.yml#L39-L67
• https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system/blob/master/bin/deploy-travis

[paulrobertlloyd]

Been attempting to deploy a tech docs site to PaaS, and run into a few issues which may have been avoided had additional documentation and/or an example config file been provided.

We’re also using Travis, and found that we needed to add the following values to .travis.yml:

before_install:
  - gem install bundler
script:
  - bundle exec middleman build --verbose

This explicitly installs Bundler prior to building the site (not sure why, but Travis was complaining about not being able to find Bundler), and overrides the default build script to build the site using Middleman rather than execute rake.

[NickColley]

Person from Ministry of Justice :

"FYI, I've put together a continuous deployment process, so that we don't have to commit changes to the 'compiled' html files, after making changes to the source files.

If you're interested, it's more or less documented here: https://github.com/ministryofjustice/cloud-platform-user-guide/blob/master/.circleci/config.yml

It's quite specific to the way we use TDT, so I don't think it's worth submitting a PR for this, but it might be of interest if/when you get any developers working on it."

[saliceti]

This Github actions workflow automatically deploys to paas: https://github.com/DFE-Digital/technical-guidance/blob/master/.github/workflows/delete_review_app.yml It also creates a review app for each new pull request.

[lfdebrux]

Unfortunately, GOV.UK PaaS is being decommissioned. In light of this, going to close this issue as won't do.