Hak

What is it

Hak provides you with a light and simple web development environment for your Mac OSX or Ubuntu.

It is a CLI that pulls code, hosts your app, and deploys it to a remote server.

In just a single command, you can now host any number of apps ranging from Node.js, PHP, to Ruby and Java applications without juggling through multiple VM's, ports, and services.

What does it do

Hak covers the entire process of an app development cycle in an elegant fashion:

It pulls code / application and sets up the docker-compose.yml file
It provides a name-based hosting of your applications, http://yourapp.docker (and not http://127.0.0.1:3000)
It deploys and launches your app to a remote Ubuntu server

Here is how that process looks like:

hak clone jaequery/honeybadger yourapp
cd yourapp
hak start

Now you should be able to view your website at http://yourapp.docker/

Lastly, after you are done coding, to deploy you simply just:

hak deploy root@yourserver.com

Hak is for you, if:

You are a 1-click kind of guy
You want an elequent way of managing your apps and hate juggling ports/IPs/hosts file
You work on multiple languages and platforms (PHP, Node.js, Ruby, and etc...)
You love Docker
Your middlename is rapid-development

Basically, if you code, Hak is for you. =P

Getting Started

Pre-requisites

Hak have been tested on OSX but it can also work in Ubuntu as well.

docker + docker compose

Install Docker

For Mac OSX

First, download this and install it [https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac](Docker for Mac OSX) Hak will not function without docker and docker-compose.

Download hak

Note: Hak is currently bundled as a ruby gem package.

gem install hak

Install Hak

Installs the DNS resolver and a reverse proxy.

hak install

Power on Hak

Now power it on by typing:

hak on

To verify that it all working, just type the following:

hak ps

You should see proxy is up and running, which is the amazing jwilder nginx proxy that hak uses for virtual hosting all your websites.

Let's create a site

Now go into a folder where you'd like to store all your websites, for instance: ~/Sites.

Let's clone one of these bad boys:

Here is my personal favorite:

honeybadger

a Ruby hackathon framework using Sinatra/Postgres with admin + ORM included

hak clone jaequery/honeybadger mysite.com

And here is for the Node.js+React fans out there:

react-starter

an express + react + mongo

hak clone jaequery/react-starter mysite.com

This will have created a ./mysite.com folder with a docker-compose.yml setup with a VIRTUAL_HOST=mysite.com.docker embedded in it.

Start the site

cd mysite.com
hak start

Your site should now be viewable at http://mysite.com.docker/ from your browser (don't forget the trailing slash). You can also modify the VIRTUAL_HOST manually by editing the docker-compose.yml file yourself.

Note) Once started, your prompt will attach itself to docker-compose logs -f, and you can hit Ctrl-c to escape out. To get back to the logs, you can type: hak logs

And to stop the site:

hak stop

You can also restart it with:

hak restart

Deply your site

Once you are done developing your site, it is time to deploy it to actual production server. Well, hak makes this extremely simple too! First, you just need a fresh install of Ubuntu 14.04 server with SSH root access or a user with sudo access.

hak deploy root@x.x.x.x

Where x.x.x.x is the IP or hostname of your Ubuntu 14.04 TLS server. And that's it.

Hak have installed Docker and Docker Compose on it if it wasn't installed already and then it have rsynced your project folder to the destination server, and then started up the docker-compose up. It also created you a docker-compose-production.yml that you can modify as you wish.

To push out updates, simply repeat the deploy command and it will rsync it, docker-compose stop, and docker-compose up itself.

Special thanks

I'd like to mention that none of this would've been possible if not for these brilliant opensource projects:

jaequery/hak

Hak