Deploying Mattermost

Deploying Mattermost with Datacol

In this post we will deploy Mattermost - an open source alternative of Slack using our CLI to demonstrate something more than “Hello World”.

At its core, Mattermost is an open source, private cloud alternative to proprietary SaaS messaging for teams. It is a great solution for communities and companies who wants to privately host their own messaging service or for developers who are looking forward to build and evolve their own chat platforms.

In summary, we will

create a new stack
create a CloudSQL (mysql) instance
link and deploy Mattermost on cluster

datacol init --project mattermost-at-gcp --stack mattermost

git clone https://github.com/datacol-io/samples.git && cd samples/mattermost
STACK=mattermost datacol apps create
datacol infra create mysql --name=mysql-1111
datacol infra link mysql-1111

datacol deploy

Create a stack

At first, go ahead and download our CLI and create a new stack.

datacol init --project mattermost-at-gcp --stack mattermost

It will authenticate with your Google account and provision a Datacol infrastructure in your account. Enter into the app directory and create a new datacol app -

git clone https://github.com/datacol-io/samples.git && cd samples/mattermost
STACK=mattermost datacol apps create

Now you are all set to deploy any container based app into cluster by running datacol deploy.

Create a Database backend

Mattermost requires a database backend. We always recommend to use managed services by cloud than by yourself unless you have a good reason to do so. To provision a CloudSQL mysql instance, run

datacol infra create mysql --name=mysql-1111

It will provision a MySQL second generation instance along with a database and an user. To see information of a resource -

> datacol infra info mysql-1111
mysql-1111
  DATABASE_URL=mysql://mysql:272b340f780e46253cd725ab1bb0f1@127.0.0.1:3306/app 
  INSTANCE_NAME=gcs-local:us-east1:mysql-42535

A SQL resource can be linked to multiple apps and automatically provision cloudsql-proxy for secure access. To link mysql-1111 with mattermost app, run

datacol infra link mysql-1111

Configuration

To provide secrets, API keys or configuration, you can use datacol env to set into environment variables

datacol env set PORT=3000 RAILS_ENV=production

Deploy mattermost

To finally deploy the app into cluster run -

datacol deploy

It will use Dockerfile to build a docker image and save into the Google registry. After a successful build, it will deploy Mattermost into the cluster and wait for the LoadBalancer for an ip.

Conclusion

We saw how we deployed Mattermost and provision a cloud service using our CLI. I hope this helps if you are looking to get up and running as quickly as possible without worrying about Kubernetes concepts (services, replicationcontrollers, deployemnts) but about apps, builds, and releases.