🛠️ `Neighborhood` : Deploy to render

[daltonrpruitt]

This is starting as just an attempt at deploying to Render.com, following various tutorials/guides online. And I wanted to track the work somewhere in convene.

In a fork for now so I can deploy to Render without needing admin privileges in root convene.

If this works in some capacity, I will add documentation, but aside from configuring the link between Render and GitHub, I'm hoping most of this work will be file configuration setup that users wouldn't have to do anyways.

[daltonrpruitt]

If we add a zinc account and add me as a member (and set limits to prevent any mess up on my end from costing excessive fees...), I can get rid of this entire fork and just work in convene directly.

[zspencer]

@anaulin - are you available to set up a Convene Rendr account? Or should we keep things constrained to Heroku for now despite their ossification?

[anaulin]

I can look into setting up a Zinc Render account, hopefully between now and next Wednesday.

[anaulin]

I created a Render account, owned by operations@zinc.coop (password is in shared Operations vault). To have a "team" with the ability to add other people, we'll be paying $19/mo/user + compute costs, which I think is fine while we experiment.

@daltonrpruitt please let me know which e-mail address should I invite to the Render account, so that you can have access.

[zspencer]

Thanks @anaulin ! We may wind up shutting this trajectory down since the $20/mo/user cost is... pretty absurd even compared to Heroku's pricing.

Since we're doing this mostly to figure out what options to present to other Neighborhood Operators; I'd have a hard time recommending something at that price tier that I haven't used in production.

I guess we stick to Heroku + Self-Deployment on Ubuntu 22.04?

[daltonrpruitt]

Yeah.... sticking with Heroku is probably wise if it doesn't have that team cost. I think avoiding the team thing is why I was trying to do all of this in a fork and with my own account, but like you said Zee, it isn't scalable for us or others long-term. My bad for not realizing that sooner.

Heroku's teams functionality is included for teams of 5 or less, and the Econ plan is $5/month for the project (I think?), so much more doable.

I will start looking more at documenting the Heroku process.

[anaulin]

Fair enough. I've downgraded the Zinc Render account to "Individual".

[zspencer]

My bad for not realizing that sooner.

We're just stepping forward down a path of exploration; learning as we go.

But yea, bummer that the pricing model for Render isn't great; but I'm glad we explored it rather than disqualifying it out right because Heroku is what we know!

[daltonrpruitt]

This can be closed as long as no one objects. I have started another PR to capture what we think is important to carry over from this one.

[anaulin]

Sounds good, no objections to closing this!

[zspencer]

No objection on my end.