Streamlining Frontend Deployment: A Guide to Zero-Downtime Releases
The Pain of Manual Deployment
In the past, software developers faced a daunting task when releasing new versions of their applications. Weeks, sometimes even months, would pass before their creations reached production environments. Fortunately, those days are behind us. Today, developers can automate the deployment process, ensuring zero downtime and maximum efficiency.
Introducing Surge: The Open-Source Static Site Hosting Solution
Surge is a free, open-source platform that offers basic SSL, customizable domain names, and a user-friendly command-line interface. With Surge, publishing native web applications is a breeze. To get started, simply install Surge globally on your machine using the command npm install -g surge. Then, test your installation by running surge in your terminal.
Automating Deployment with Git Hooks
While manual deployment using the command line is possible, it’s not the most efficient approach. With Git hooks, we can automate the deployment process, ensuring that our application is updated whenever a specified Git event is triggered. To demonstrate this, let’s create a sample React project using create-react-app. By default, this will initialize a Git repository.
Next, we’ll set up a pre-push hook using Husky, a third-party package. This hook will build our React project and deploy the bundled application to the specified domain. To do this, add the following script to your package.json file:
json
"scripts": {
"pre-push": "npm run build && surge"
}
Continuous Deployment with Travis CI
In addition to Git hooks, we can also use Travis CI, a popular continuous integration tool, to automate our deployment process. To demonstrate this, let’s create a sample Vue application using vue create travis-demo. Then, we’ll connect our GitHub repository to Travis CI and add a .travis.yml file to our project directory.
This file will contain the necessary configurations for Travis to deploy our Vue application to Surge. Here’s an example of what the file might look like:
yaml
language: node_js
cache:
directories:
- node_modules
script: npm run build
deploy:
provider: surge
project: dist
domain: yourdomain.com
on:
branch: main
skip_cleanup: true
Setting Up Environment Variables
To authenticate with Surge, we’ll need to add our Surge authentication details as secret environment variables to Travis CI. To do this, retrieve your Surge authentication token using the command surge token. Then, add the token to your Travis CI dashboard.
The Power of Automation
With our setup complete, we can now push local changes to our remote repository, triggering the Travis CI build and automatic deployment to Surge. This streamlined process ensures zero downtime and maximum efficiency, allowing us to focus on what matters most – building amazing applications.
Take Your Debugging to the Next Level
If you’re interested in monitoring and tracking Vue mutations for all your users in production, try LogRocket. With LogRocket, you can debug your Vue apps exactly how a user does, aggregating and reporting on what state your application was in when an issue occurred.
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