Orchestrator¶

The Orchestrator is a FastAPI service that manages docker containers, swarm services, and in general access to the site directories.

Hosting Sites¶

As mentioned in the section about docker swarm, Director hosts sites as services on a docker swarm.

We then use a program called Traefik to route traffic into the service. Traefik works by configuring a set of labels on the service that tell it how to route traffic into the container.

For example, the following labels

traefik.http.routers.my-site.rule=Host(`hi.example.com`)
traefik.http.routers.my-site.service=my-site-service
traefik.http.services.my-site-service.loadbalancer.server.port=80

creates a Traefik router called my-site. This redirects requests from hi.example.com into port 80 of my-site service.

Traefik discovers the different swarm services by being connected to the same overlay network as the services. This means that Traefik is also being run on the docker swarm itself.

Dynamic Sites¶

For a dynamic site, hosting it is relatively simple. The following actions happen on site deployment:

Choose a docker base image (either the default, or a custom one for the site)
Start a service on the docker swarm (with the name site_{site_id:04d} - e.g. site_0001) running the base image with an entrypoint that runs the run.sh file.
Give the service labels so that traefik can route requests into the service.

Additionally, there are bind mounts for things like /site to ensure data persistence. Whenever a user wants to open a terminal, they can access the same docker image used in deployment.

Static Sites¶

The steps for static site deployments include:

Start a service using the nginx:latest docker image
Give the service labels so that traefik can route requests into the service.

There is significantly less configurability with static sites (by design). Additionally, if a user wants to open a web terminal, they do NOT get access to the nginx:latest container, but rather a default base image or a customized base image for the site.