Gander automates the provisioning, state, and teardown of your review apps while allowing you maintain full control over your source code and self-hosted infrastructure. Currently, we only support AWS as a cloud provider and Postgres as a database.

To learn more, please read our extensive case study.

Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
• Prerequisites
• Installation and Setup
• Commands

Prerequisites

• AWS Account
• AWS CLI Configured with your AWS Account
• Node + NPM
• Application Repository

Can my application use Gander?

Your application is supported by Gander if it:

• Uses Postgres for storage
• Can be built into an image using Cloud Native Buildpacks

Installation and Setup

• To get started, run the command npm install -g gander-cli to globally install Gander on your machine

• Before initializing Gander with any applications, you must run gander setup, which will provision and configure all of the necessary infrastructure you need to begin deploying review apps. See Commands for more information about this command. Keep track of the AWS access keys that are generated during this process - this is the only place they will ever appear.

• Add a wildcard CNAME DNS Record to the domain you provided

$ npm install -g gander-cli
$ gander setup
running setup...
$ gander (-v|--version|version)
gander-cli/0.0.1 darwin-x64 node-v14.15.1
$ gander --help [COMMAND]
...

To integrate Gander with an application:

• Navigate to the root of your project repository
• Ensure you are on your application's main branch - Gander requires that the generated Github workflow files be present on this branch for the review app process.
• Run gander init - See Commands for details about each piece of information init requires.
• Add the AWS Access Keys that were generated during gander setup as secrets to your project's Github repository.
• For Python applications, provide the entrypoint command in a Procfile in the root directory using the format web: $ENTRYPOINT. The app needs to run on port 8080 with 0.0.0.0 as the host. See the Procfile in our sample Django app for an example.
• Django applications can include '*' as one of their ALLOWED_HOSTS because Gander's load balancer handles host header validation.

Environment Variables

Gander uses environment variables to manage the connection to the database. Your application needs to use these three environment variables:

• PG_HOST -- This is the host name for your database connection.
• PG_USER -- This is the username for postgres database.
• PG_PW -- This is the password for the postgres database.

Gander also needs to be able to set the port your application server listens on using the environment variable PORT.

To add additional environment variables to your application server's runtime, follow these steps:

1. Add your environment variables to your repository's secrets.
2. Open .github/actions/build-server/action.yml
3. Add your environment variables to the pack build command, on lines 22-23.

For example, if you have an API_TOKEN environment variable, it would be added like this after you create your secrets:

  pack build $IMAGE_ARN \
  --builder $BUILDER \
  --path $SERVER_PATH \
  --env API_TOKEN=${{ secrets.API_TOKEN }} \
  --publish

If you have both an API_TOKEN and an API_URL, you can add two environment variables like this:

  pack build $IMAGE_ARN \
  --builder $BUILDER \
  --path $SERVER_PATH \
  --env API_TOKEN=${{ secrets.API_TOKEN }} \
  --env API_URL=${{ secrets.API_URL }} \
  --publish

Commands

• gander destroy
• gander help [COMMAND]
• gander init
• gander list
• gander setup
• gander where

gander destroy

Destroy all AWS resources created for Gander review apps

USAGE
  $ gander destroy

See code: src/commands/destroy.js

gander help [COMMAND]

display help for gander

USAGE
  $ gander help [COMMAND]

ARGUMENTS
  COMMAND  command to show help for

OPTIONS
  --all  see all commands in CLI

See code: @oclif/plugin-help

gander init

Initialize your project repository as a Gander review app

USAGE
  $ gander init

See code: src/commands/init.js

gander list

List all active Gander repos

USAGE
  $ gander list

See code: src/commands/list.js

gander setup

Create all the AWS resources required to deploy Gander review apps

USAGE
  $ gander setup

See code: src/commands/setup.js

gander where

Print out the location of your Gander global configuration file

USAGE
  $ gander where

See code: src/commands/where.js