How does Voca deploy a new Decidim?

Voca needs to deploy a decidim in less than 2minutes. But the deployment process takes up to 16min in the most complicated case. Voca reduces the time of installation by preparing a set of empty decidim instance, we call this parking.

So Voca uses a parking system to always have available instances. Once a user want a new decidim, he creates an instance, that will be paired to parked environment. An instance keeps user’s settings, a parked environment keeps informations about the Jelastic infrastructure.

What do we park?

A standard infrastructure, ready for scale

Even for the most basic installation, we are ready to scale, horizontally and vertically. To do this, we setup Docker containers in jelastic to have:

• A redis database
• A memcached database
• A nginx
• A decidim server, with our special sauce
• A internal decidim API server.
• A safe storage node

Decidim docker image for Voca

We leverage a docker image for voca usage. This includes:

• specific entrypoint and hooks for jelastic infrastructures, to ensure UNIX permissions are right (shared volume storage can have have some problems, depending on starting order)
• a gem voca with:
  • a new process, gruf that exposes an internal Decidim API through gRPC protocol.
  • a middleware that will allow to run decidim with dynamic configuration (normally currency is setted through environnement variables). So here we can change some values dynamically.

Voca DB models: Environment and instance

In the Strapi backend, we define two important models:

• api::decidim.environment stores information about the Jelastic environment. You will find attributes like:
  • envName The uniq name of the Jelastic environment, use to know where the environment is installed.
  • subdomain The subdomain used for routing