Deploying Smeagol

Choosing a deployment mechanism

There are currently three ways you can deploy Smeagol: as an executable Jar file, as a Docker image, and as a web-app in a Servlet container. Each method has advantages and disadvantages.

The Jar file is extremely easy to deploy and to configure, but cannot currently serve HTTPS, which, on the modern web, is a significant disadvantage. The Docker image is just a wrapper around the Jar file; it's particularly suitable for automated deployment. The web-app solution offloads responsibility for things like HTTPS to the Servlet container, and consequently can be much more secure; but it can really only be configured at compile time.

Deploying as a stand-alone application

To deploy Smeagol as a stand-alone application, either download the jar file for the release you want to deploy, or clone the source and compile it with:

lein bower install
lein ring uberjar

This will create a jar file in the target directory, named smeagol-VERSION-standalone.jar.

Smeagol cannot access either its configuration or its content from the jar file, as otherwise they would not be editable. There are three solutions to this:

Custom configuration file

You can copy the standard Configuration file resources/config.edn to somewhere outside the jar file, edit it to suit your installation, and set up a single environment variable, SMEAGOL_CONFIG, whose value is the path to your new configuration file.

Environment variables

Alternatively, you can configure everything through Environment Variables.

Hybrid strategy

You can have both a configuration file and environment variables. If you do this, the environment variables override the values in the configuration file.

Necessary content

NOTE that the directory at SMEAGOL_CONTENT_DIR must contain at least the following files:

1. _edit-side-bar.md - the side-bar that should be displayed when editing pages;
2. _header.md - the header to be displayed on all pages;
3. _side-bar.md - the side-bar that should be displayed when not editing pages.

Standard versions of these files can be found in the source repository.

You can run the jar file with:

java -jar smeagol-VERSION-standalone.jar

Deploying within a servlet container

To deploy Smeagol within a servlet container, either download the jar file for the release you want to deploy, or clone the source and compile it with:

lein bower install
lein ring uberwar

This will create a war file in the target directory, named smeagol-VERSION-standalone.war. Deploy this to your servlet container in the normal way; details will depend on your container. Instructions for Tomcat are here.

The problem with this is that unless the environment variables (see above) were already set up in the environment of the servlet container at the time when the servlet container were launched, Smeagol will run with its built-in defaults. If you want to change the defaults, you would have to edit the resources/config.edn file and recompile the war file.

On Debian/Ubuntu hosts, to have the environment variable(s) set in the environment of the servlet container, edit /etc/default/tomcat8 and add them as export statements, e.g.:

# Experimental, added by simon 20171204
export SMEAGOL_CONFIG=/usr/local/etc/smeagol/config.edn

Obviously, the configuration has to point to places which the tomcat8 user can read, and, in the case of content, also write.

Experimental Docker image

You can now run Smeagol as a Docker image. Read more about using the Docker Image.