stremio-beamup

🛠️ A platform as a service (PaaS) hosting for Stremio addons: as easy a Heroku/Now.sh, but DYI and without the restrictions.

It is based on Dokku, but with two significant differences:

• It's designed with public use in mind - you can authenticate yourself using your GitHub account and push addons
• It only supports Stremio addons and it's optimized for them (by using specific caching policies)

To deploy this yourself, you'll need:

• A Cherryservers account and API key
• Terraform - tested with version 1.6.2
• Ansible - tested with ansible community package 7.2
• Go & Terraform inventory
• A domain name
• A CloudFlare account and API token

Deployment

WARNING: this only refers to deploying stremio-beamup itself, not deploying addons to it

1. Run ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f id_deploy or ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f id_deploy -C "tf_deploy_key".

2. Register on Cherryservers, fund your account and create a project.

3. Paste your numeric project ID into creds/cherryservers_project_id; create an API key and paste it into a new file: creds/cherryservers.

4. Start an ssh-agent e.g. eval `ssh-agent` & load the key from step 1 into the agent - ssh-add id_deploy.

5. Create an 'authorized_keys' containing the public keys of users who should access the deployment, including the public SSH Key generated in previous step.

6. Run touch id_ed25519_deployer_sync.pub to workaround a TF0.12 issue.

7. Register a domain.
   This can be done in CloudFlare too in the next step, or it can be registered from any domain provider like NameCheap, GoDaddy, etc.

8. Setup CloudFlare

   1. Create an account on CloudFlare.
   2. Follow the on-screen instructions to add your domain (also known as a 'zone' or 'site').
   3. Once the zone is added, locate and note down the Zone ID. Add this to a cloudflare_zone_id file in the creds/ directory.
   4. Create an API Token within CloudFlare with the permission of DNS:Edit for the zone you just created. Save this token to a cloudflare_token file in the creds/ directory.

9. Setup Terraform and apply configurations:

   • Setup CherryServers Providers for Terraform
     Since the CherryServers provider is not being actively updated, it is not available on the Terraform Registry. You'll need to install it manually by following these steps:
     • Download CherryServers Provider: Navigate to the CherryServers Download Page and download the file named terraform-provider-cherryservers.
     • Place the File: Move the downloaded terraform-provider-cherryservers file to the following directory structure (this is for Linux users):
       ~/.terraform.d/plugins/terraform.local/local/cherryservers/1.0.0/linux_amd64/
   • Run the Terraform initialization command:

     terraform init
     

   • Apply the Terraform configuration using the appropriate .tfvars file for your environment:

     terraform apply -var-file=dev.tfvars
     # OR for production
     terraform apply -var-file=prod.tfvars
     

   Make sure to copy and edit the .tfvars files from their corresponding .tfvars.example if you haven't done so. Fill in the necessary information for your specific environment (either development, production or other).

10. Create a DNS A Record for the deployer's public IP, e.g.: deployer.beamup.dev.
    It can be created in CloudFlare. This DNS can be used with beamup-cli to deploy the addons.

By default, this will bootstrap a single server called deployer that can be used to deploy addons too and a docker swarm with two nodes where the addons will be deployed.

CAVEAT: Depending on the Cherryservers node setup, the first ansible playbook execution might fail with "E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable" error. This is due to server setup scripts on the Cherryservers, simply restart the terraform apply command.

Deploying an addon

Use beamup-cli to deploy addons.

Setting environment variables

Setting/getting environment variables is similar to the way Dokku does it, however you do it through ssh, and you need to pass the same addon slug that's used in the git remote that ./cli/beamup adds.

For example: ssh [email protected] config:set 768c7b2546f2/hello NODE_ENV=production

Addon application logs

Logs of deployed addons can easily be fetched in way, similar to the way Dokku does it, however through ssh

For example: ssh [email protected] logs 768c7b2546f2/hello

Architecture decisions

• Why Dokku: it supports both Heroku buildpacks and Docker images, and it's super easy to configure and use
• Why we're using container ports rather than container IPs: so we can make use of the swarm routing for zero downtime

FAQ

Why Cherryservers?

Because they have a Terraform provider and you can pay with Bitcoin.

Can I use this as a general purpose PaaS?

No - it performs addon-specific checks/optimizations. You can easily modify it for general-purpose usage though, by tweaking NGINX configs and Dokku CHECKS.

Does it only support nodejs?

No, it supports every stack that there's a heroku buildpack for, as well as any repo that has a Dockerfile.

ToDo