Mikel Larreategi: How we deploy cookieplone based projects.

We saw that cookieplone was coming up, and Docker, and as game changer uv making the installation of Python packages much faster.

With cookieplone you get a monorepo, with folders for backend, frontend, and devops. devops contains scripts to setup the server and deploy to it. Our sysadmins already had some other scripts. So we needed to integrate that.

First idea: let's fork it. Create our own copy of cookieplone. I explained this in my World Plone Day talk earlier this year. But cookieplone was changing a lot, so it was hard to keep our copy updated.

Maik Derstappen showed me copier, yet another templating language. Our idea: create a cookieplone project, and then use copier to modify it.

What about the deployment? We are on GitLab. We host our runners. We use the docker-in-docker service. We develop on a branch and create a merge request (pull request in GitHub terms). This activates a piple to check-test-and-build. When it is merged, bump the version, use release-it.

Then we create deploy keys and tokens. We give these access to private GitLab repositories. We need some changes to SSH key management in pipelines, according to our sysadmins.

For deployment on the server: we do not yet have automatic deployments. We did not want to go too fast. We are testing the current pipelines and process, see if they work properly. In the future we can think about automating deployment. We just ssh to the server, and perform some commands there with docker.

Future improvements:

• Start the docker containers and curl/wget the /ok endpoint.
• lock files for the backend, with pip/uv.