Deployment

SkyPortal can be deployed either with or without using Docker. Without Docker, all services (such as the database) need to be running locally, as described in setup.

More commonly, production deployment will use Docker images. Here, we discuss how to deploy via docker-compose, but much of the same information applies when using Kubernetes, for which we have an example deployment.

Building the Docker images

The first step is to obtain the images to launch. We deploy SkyPortal images to Docker Hub from time to time, which you can fetch using:

docker pull skyportal/web

Otherwise, you may build the images from scratch:

make docker-local

Starting containers

Next, we deploy two containers: web (the SkyPortal application) and db (the PostgreSQL server). The database is stored in a local docker volume called skyportal_dbdata (see docker volume ls).

docker-compose up -d

Once both services are up and running, you may browse to SkyPortal at http://localhost:9000.

Handling problems

You can see which containers are running with docker-compose ps.

Inspect the logs for the running containers using:

docker-compose logs web
docker-compose logs db

(Or, follow the logs with docker-compose logs -f db.)

Adding test data

To add some test data to play with, run:

docker-compose run web bash -c 'source /skyportal_env/bin/activate && make load_demo_data'

Stopping the deployment

You may stop both containers using:

docker-compose stop

Or stop and remove them using:

docker-compose down

This does not affect data, which lives in the ./dbdata directory.