Hi Jay @pfaffman Thanks for this post and others on this “two container” topic, including Sam’s writings on this as well.
Question:
We have been trying to set up two containers as you mention, one container for data and one for web-only and have been running into a number snags getting this running on macos.
But before we worry about debugging this “two container config” on the mac or Ubuntu, we would like to make sure we are doing this for the right reason.
The reason we want to do the “two container dance” is so the site will not go down when we rebuild the web app, for example when installing a plugin. Also, when we tweak a homegrown plugin; we noticed that sometimes the only way to insure our changes work is to rebuild (that is a story for another day) I’ve also been struggling getting a “fast and friendly” web dev setup going to my satisfaction as a well; but that is another topic for another day.
So, my question is that does the “two container” setup significantly minimize down time when the web-only part of the app is rebuilt?
That’s the right way to think of this, isn’t that right?
When we install a plugin or tweak one, we need to rebuild only the “web-only” yml file and not the data yml ?
We come from a LAMP forum background so changes to plugins can and are mostly done in runtime on the live site (with no down time unless we fat finger something). Also, we hail from some VueJS web apps where we build on the desktop and then we just upload and move the new app into place and there is virtually no down time upgrade / updating a VueJS part of the site. However, with Discourse we get downtime, which we do not want (even a few seconds).
Does the “two container” solution show significant improvements in downtime when we either (1) rebuild the app (for plugins, tweak code, etc) or (2) restore from a full backup?
I feel like I’m going to get “beat up” (again) for asking this question because we are looking for a way to run Discourse in production and make changes with near zero downtime, and we have not yet found a way to do things which are so easy to do with a LAMP or VueJS app (for example).
Hence, the struggle / interest in the “two container” method which we have yet to get up and running.
Thanks!