Review use of dokku-alt

Thanks. Good call... I'm happy to just wait and see what happens in this space. If the current docs work then I think they're still a good choice that is low maintenance.

Do you have any suggestions for things to look at?

Some dokku-alt users are talking of porting bits back to the original dokku. Maybe that'll happen.

I wonder if PAAS is really what you want though. Maybe you'd be better off using docker-compose?

mc0e thanks for the suggestion. Right now I'm not about to put time into the deployment stuff, as we're working super hard on the software itself. I expect I'll be working on deployment again in a month or 2. In the meantime I welcome any contributions in the form of how to's for setting up Loomio another way.

GitLab uses the Chef-based Omnibus installer which has been working really well for me so far, with automatic database migrations and service restarts during apt-get update (also lots of customization options).

I just started setting up my Loomio instance and the first problem I ran into is that dokku-alt only supports Ubuntu :( I'm very familiar with deploying Rails apps so I'm wondering if I could get away with a simple Capistrano setup and manage the puma/delayed_job processes myself?

Managed to get further with dokku-alt, but hit the next roadblock:

-----> Ruby app detected
-----> Compiling Ruby/Rails
       !
       !     An error occurred while installing Ruby ruby-2.3.0
       !     For supported Ruby versions see https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/ruby-support#supported-runtimes
       !     Note: Only the most recent version of Ruby 2.1 is supported on Cedar-14
       !     Command: 'set -o pipefail; curl --fail --retry 3 --retry-delay 1 --connect-timeout 30 --max-time 30 https://s3-external-1.amazonaws.com/heroku-buildpack-ruby/cedar-14/ruby-2.3.0.tgz -s -o - | tar zxf - ' failed unexpectedly:
       !
       !     gzip: stdin: invalid compressed data--format violated
       !     tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
       !     tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
       !     tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
       !

Apparently it's because of the curl timeout, not sure where to set the CURL_TIMEOUT variable though (CURL_TIMEOUT=... git push didn't work, neither did adding to /etc/environment on the server).

If somebody has time to help me with a manual setup I'd be happy to write a guide and maybe integrate some parts into the codebase (e.g. Capistrano config stubs, whenever for cronjobs).

@robertguthrie I reckon would be the perfect person for that; Loomio's changed quite a bit since we wrote the Dokku install guide and I reckon some energy into working out the kinks in it would be super useful.

Sorry to hear that you're having trouble @toupeira. I'm really not sure how to support you on this. This network timeout issue seems temporary... Are you still stuck on this issue? What's the internet connection like for the server? Can it resolve DNS requests .. can you curl fetch the tar ball manually?

@robertguthrie nevermind, I was able to deploy Loomio using Capistrano with some small tweaks :)

To keep my diff minimal I'd be happy to submit a PR to add environment variables for some of this (mainly email settings, S3 storage)

Everything seems to work great so far, so I'm wondering about the rest of the setup:
- what's the Faye server used for exactly?
- is loomio-email-gateway still needed, or is it possible to use/hack mailin to send the API call to Loomio directly?

Great work @toupeira!

Faye is used to manage the websocket connections and the publish subscribe model.

Loomio-email-gateway is still needed right now but it's quite possible that you could move that logic into the loomio app itself, exposing a Mailin specific API.

@robertguthrie I meant, which feature in Loomio uses pub-sub? ;-)