Customizations without restarting the server?

[sclemance]

I am using DigitalOcean's App platform to deploy the latest Docker image. Is there a way to cleanly restart the node.js kutt app without restarting the deployment? I'm trying to import/download the customizations to the /kutt/custom folder post-deployment without restarting the deployment and wiping ephemeral storage in the process. I'm using an external database so if I can avoid using a Droplet I will.

[trgwii]

You can probably just mount the volume to something I think? OR just make your own image based on it? I'm not that familiar with DigitalOcean or Docker

[sclemance]

Fair, and I appreciate your reply. The app platform in DigitalOcean appeals to my lazy admin lifestyle persuasions - the lower maintenance isn't as flexible as running my own server, which I may just end up doing. Was just curious if there was a clean way for kutt to recognize changes without restarting the whole thing. I was hoping to git clone the /kutt/custom files and then perhaps do something as simple as npm restart.

[trgwii]

Running Kutt in dev mode would cause it to restart by itself when there are changes in custom/ (as well as other code files), but it's not particularly recommended. npm start will actually hang the caller until the server exits, so having something like npm restart would require more signaling machinery than what is currently implemented.

[sclemance]

I took a minute and stuck my nose deeper into DigitalOcean's slightly lackluster documentation for the App Platform. Looks like in their YAML app spec, run_command overrides the dockerfile's CMD, (similar to entrypoint), so I was able to do the following:

run_command: sh -c "apk --no-cache add git && rm -rf /kutt/custom && git clone https://github.com/mycompany/mytheme.git /kutt/custom && npm run migrate && npm start"

A couple comments for anyone interested: I noticed that whatever was following run_command in DO's was not being parsed/processed like the shell would, so I found it necessary to use sh -c. Finally, I just tacked on the CMD from the dockerfile to finish things off, (since this overrides the dockerfile's CMD), npm run migrate && npm start.