magic.deploy

This guide helps you deploy Magic unto a VPS or a private server. The guide has been tested with Ubuntu 20.04 (LTS) x64, but might work with other Debian based distributions. You will need a VPS instance somewhere, which you can buy at for instance DigitalOcean. You will also need a domain and point two DNS A records to your server’s IP address. Typically these would resemble the following.

api.yourdomain.com
magic.yourdomain.com

We suggest you don’t buy the cheapest VPS droplet from DigitalOcean, but chose at least the one that will cost you $12 per month. Their cheapest droplet simply doesn’t have enough memory to run Magic optimally. 2GB of memory should be enought to host Magic, MySQL, and the frontend dashboard.

Installing Magic

First use SSH to login to your VPS instance. This is typically achieved using something such as the following on *Nix based systems.

ssh root@123.123.123.123

The IP address above needs to be the IP address of your VPS. After you’ve executed the above, you’ll be asked for your root password on your VPS instance. Notice, if you are using Windows you can use Putty, and/or if you’re using DigitalOcean you can use their web based terminal interface as an alternative. When you have logged into your VPS you can clone magic.deploy into your VPS server using the following command.

git clone https://github.com/polterguy/magic.deploy.git

If the above gives you an error, you might need to install git using the following command and then run the above command again afterwards.

apt install git

When you have successfully cloned this repository, change into the magic.deploy folder using the following command.

cd magic.deploy

The docker-compose.yml file needs to be manually edited to provide your email address, frontend domain, and backend domain, before you execute the docker-compose command. You can do this with the following command.

nano docker-compose.yml

And then look through the file for the following YAML nodes.

- VIRTUAL_HOST=magic-api.aista.com
- LETSENCRYPT_HOST=magic-api.aista.com
- LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL=th@aista.com

---
- VIRTUAL_HOST=magic.aista.com
- LETSENCRYPT_HOST=magic.aista.com
- LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL=th@aista.com

In total there are 6 entries you need to change, and the email address needs to be a valid email address you own. The domain needs to be a sub-domain you own where you want to run your Magic installation. When you are done editing the docker-compose.yml file, hold down the CTRL key and click X, then type “Y” when Nano asks you if you want to save the file after you have edited the file, and save it with its existing filename. When you are done execute the following command in your terminal. This installs docker for you, in addition to docker compose.

apt install docker docker-compose

After you have installed docker and docker compose, you have to create a virtual docker network. This is necessary to make sure your containers have a virtual network to communicate with each other.

docker network create nginx-proxy

This command will create a docker proxy network Magic needs to be able to connect all the docker images within your docker-compose file with each other. When you have created the above network, you can start your docker containers using the following command.

docker-compose up -d

Internals

The above docker-compose up -d command will start 5 docker containers.

proxy - The nGinx proxy that internally routes requests to either your backend or your frontend
acme - The container responsible for retrieving and renewing LetsEncrypt SSL certificates for you
db - Your MySQL database, used to create the “magic” database that Magic internally depends upon
backend - The main Magic backend container
frontend - The main Magic dashboard frontend container

In addition to the above containers, docker will also create several volumes for you. These volumes are necessary to persist changes to the file system for your containers, such that if your containers are stopped for some reasons, and/or you update Magic later, you will keep your changes. The most important volumes that Magic itself relies upon are as follows.

database - Where MySQL store its database files
etc_magic_folder - Where Magic stores its “etc” files
modules_magic_folder - Where Magic stores its “modules” files
config_magic_folder - Where Magic stores its “appsettings.json” file

The rest of the volumes are documented in either of the following two container projects that Magic’s internal deployment depends upon.

The first project above creates the nGinx proxy that “routes” requests to the correct container according to the host name specified in your HTTP requests. The second is to install a LetsEncrypt SSL certificate key pair for both your backend and frontend, ensuring you’ve got encrypted HTTPS communication to both your backend and your frontend.

Configuring Magic

You can now visit your frontend domain and setup Magic. As you click the login button, you have to provide Magic with your backend API URL. This is achieved by simply pasting in your backend API URL into the top textbox and click the tab key on your keyboard. If your domain was “yourdomain.com”, and you created your DNS records as illustrated above, your API backend URL would be the following.

https://magic-api.yourdomain.com

To configure Magic login with “root/root” and choose mysql as your database type. Do not change any parts of the connection string unless you know what you’re doing. Then provide Magic with a root password, and follow the wizard to the end. This process is similar to the process you follow as you configure Magic locally on your development machine.

Securing your VPS

You might want to install a firewall on your Linux server to further secure your installation. This can be done by executing the following commands in order of appearance.

apt install ufw; ufw allow 80; ufw allow 443; ufw allow 22; ufw enable;

The above will install “Uncomplicated FireWall” on your server, for then to shut off all ports except port 80, 443 and 22. 22 is needed to allow for SSH into your server. In addition, you would probably benefit from making sure your operating system is updated with the latest patches as released by whomever is distributing your particular Linux installation.

Updating Magic

Updating Magic should be fairly straight forward and only requires that you tear down your containers, pull the Magic images from docker hub, and restart your containers using the following.

docker-compose down
docker pull aistamagic/magic-frontend
docker pull aistamagic/magic-backend
docker-compose up -d