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Video notes for 5.10.6

GitHub Actions Templates with walk through videos

We’ve created 4 GitHub Action mix templates to help you setup your CI environment on GitHub Actions quickly for new and existing ServiceStack templated projects.

They are designed to get you started with a CI environment earlier by making it quicker to setup with cost effective hosting. Rather than a focus on the ability to scale with cloud vendor offerings, they provide a pattern to dockerize and prototype your applications from the start and host them on a single cost effective server you can reuse.

Once your application requires a more robust hosting environment, the provided GitHub Action yaml files act as a starting point to modify as you need to suit you new deployment strategy, leaning on GitHub Marketplace for Actions to make it easy to update.

These GitHub Action release templates use the naming convention of release-{docker image repository}-{host type} so that we can create templates with multiple provider options.

Updated x new projects include Dockerfile

To match our new GitHub Action mix templates for deployments, we’ve also updated our x new templates to include a Dockerfile to make your application portable from the start of your project.

After your new project is created with x new, it is ready to run in Docker, meaning your application is portable to a large number of hosting providers that support various container hosting options.

GitHub Container Registry deployed to a Linux server via SSH

The first GitHub Actions template, release-ghr-vanilla, uses GitHub’s own Container Repository (ghcr.io) and a standalone “vanilla” Linux server that can host multiple prototype or low traffic applications for a cost effective option.

GitHub Actions deploys to this stand alone Linux server via SSH and an nginx-proxy container along with a LetsEncrypt companion container that takes care of the TLS certificates automatically.

Full written tutorial and example available here.

There are two other variations on this template where alternate Docker container repositories can be used.

AWS ECS without an Application Load Balancer (ALB)

An alternate setup we have created is the release-ecr-aws template that uses AWS ECS (EC2 Container Service) to handle deployments but uses a single EC2 server with nginx-proxy container with Lets Encrypt companion to handle the request routing.

This is a cheap way to get multiple prototype applications onto ECS while avoiding ALB costs for low traffic applications that only need part of a EC2 instance to run.

The GitHub Actions can then be easily modified to support the more traditional ECS setup with an ALB for a more robust setup that supports high availability and horizontal scaling.

Full written tutorial and example available here.

Servicify and Deploy SQLite’s Chinook Sample Database with AutoQuery

To improve our documentation and training material, we’re also producing more written and video tutorials of existing features. In this video we start with an empty application and take an existing database and show how using AutoQuery and related x tooling to “Servicifiy” a database quickly while still retaining flexibility and features of standard ServiceStack services.

The Chinook SQLite sample database represents a digital store, and by starting with a new ServiceStack web project, we can instantly make this data fully queryable as well as manageable via the autocrudgen mix template.

Full written tutorial and example available here.

ServiceStack Studio Features Highlight Video

On the theme of AutoQuery, we’ve also made a feature highlight video focusing on how AutoQuery services can help developers and non-developers alike to manage service access with our ServiceStack Studio application.

ServiceStack Studio can be used for prototyping or even managing services, data, users, permissions and validation. There are quite a lot of features, so we’ve tried to make the capabilities of AutoQuery + ServiceStack Studio clearer with this demonstration video.

ServiceStack Studio documentation can be found here

Instant Client Apps

To demonstrate our new free Instant Client Apps tool, we’ve created a video walk through of using it to create a mobile Flutter Android application. The tutorial steps through using Instant Client Apps in your workflows by generating a working Dart client app that is then incorporated into the new Flutter application.