Content Installation

The sections below provide details on mechanisms for creating bundles and deploying content created with the L7|ESP SDK. After reading this documentation, you’ll understand how production bundles of L7|ESP are built and how to install a production bundle in either an existing Linux server or inside of a container.

Deployment Bundle

For deploying the application in production, L7 provides an application bundle that contains specific versions of L7|ESP and related tools, along with all content that customers have defined in their L7|ESP SDK. These bundles must be generated on request by L7, and once created, can be used to install L7|ESP and custom content on a production system.

Deployment bundles are structured in a way that mirrors the L7|ESP SDK structure, since a lot of the commands for installing the bundle in production are the same as those that install the bundle in the development VM. Generally, the only differences between the L7|ESP SDK structure and the deployment bundle structure are a few boilerplate files (the README.md, Makefile, and the docs/ folder).

Installation

Requirements

The deployment bundle must be installed on one of the following Linux-based operating systems:

Ubuntu 20.04+
RHEL/CentOS 7+

Aside from the operating system, the only additional requirement is make, which comes by default on most Linux-based operating systems.

Install

After extracting this package, you can use the Makefile to install L7|ESP and all custom content created for this deployment:

~$ tar -zxvf <package-name>.tar.gz
~$ cd <package-name>
~$ make install

This command will prompt for several configuration settings (hit <enter> to use defaults) and then proceed to install L7|ESP and import all custom content.

You can check the status of the installation at any time by running:

~$ make status
L7|ESP web server      : Available
L7|ESP system services : Available
L7|ESP database        : Available

Update

To update an existing installation with a new L7|ESP bundle or related software/content, you can use a similar process as the install process. However, instead of make install, you’ll use make update to perform the update:

~$ tar -zxvf <package-name>.tar.gz
~$ cd <package-name>
~$ make update

This command will run through a lot of the same tasks as make install, but will preserve the database state and also perform any necessary database migrations for the update process.

Administration

Reload

If at any point you need to reload the application after install (i.e. if the application gets into a strange state or if you’ve rebooted the server), you can run:

~$ make reload

This command will take down the instance (if it’s running) and reload the L7|ESP service (including all related web, logging, and pipeline services).

Import

If at any point you’ve deleted your database and need to re-import content defined in the customer bundle, you can run:

~$ make import

All of the content that you’ve defined as part of your production configuration will be loaded.

Database

Reset

If at any point you need to reset the application after install (i.e. completely wipe the application database), you can run:

~$ make reset

This command will take down the instance (if it’s running), remove the database, re-run database migrations and setup, and reload the L7|ESP service (including all related web, logging, and pipeline services).

Note

Please be careful when resetting a production database. All data will be lost. If you set db_archive: true in your production playbook, the database will always be backed up in a folder called archive in the application install directory.

Archive

To create a backup of the application database (including all content and data created by the application), you can run:

~$ make archive

This command will create a .sql file (in a folder called archive inside of the application install directory) containing a database dump from the application.

Other Commands

Below are the list of available commands in the deployment bundle’s Makefile:

~$ make help
info                list info about package
init                install prerequisites
install             provision production instance
update              update existing esp installation with ansible
reset               reset database with ansible tasks
archive             backup/archive esp database
stop                stop running esp instance
reload              reload or start application
import              import bundled content with ansible
status              check status of running esp instance