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 - version 0.12 or later
Ansible
Go & Terraform inventory

Deployment

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

Run ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f id_deploy
Register on Cherryservers and fund your account
Create an API key and paste it into a new file: creds/cherryservers; paste your numeric project ID into creds/cherryservers-project-id
Start an ssh-agent & load the key from step 1 into the agent - ssh-add id_deploy
Create an 'authorized_keys' containing the public keys of users who should access the deployment.
Run touch id_ed25519_deployer_sync.pub to workaround a TF0.12 issue
Run terraform apply

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 dokku@deployer.beamup.dev 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 dokku@deployer.beamup.dev 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.

dexter21767/stremio-beamup