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Overview

Following sections give you detailed information about system requirements, installation and configuration steps. After following directives successfully, you will get a running Appcircle instance on your infrastructure.

Prerequisites​

Below are the hardware and OS requirements for self-hosted Appcircle installation.

Supported Linux Distributions​

Self-hosted Appcircle server utilizing Docker, can only be installed on Linux operating system.

  • Ubuntu 20.04 or later
  • Debian 11 or later
  • CentOS 8 or later
  • RHEL 8 or later

Hardware Requirements​

Minimum hardware requirements for self-hosted Appcircle can be:

  • 100GB or more free disk space
  • 4 or more cores CPU
  • 8 or more gigabytes (GB) RAM

☝ These hardware specs are minimum requirements for basic execution and it can be used only for quick evaluation or development purposes.

caution

CPU architecture must be AMD or Intel 64-bit arch (x86_64).

info

If you have enough RAM and a recent CPU, performance of Appcircle server can be limited by hard drive seek times. So, having a fast drive like a solid state drive (SSD) improves runtime.

Higher numbers will be better especially for increased number of users.

For an enterprise installation, minimum hardware requirements are

  • 500GB SSD
  • 8 CPU
  • 16GB RAM

For production environments, recommended hardware requirements are

  • 1TB SSD
  • 32 CPU
  • 64GB RAM
caution

Swap​

Using swap file lets self-hosted Appcircle server exceed the size of available physical memory. On memory pressure system will go on its operations with minimal degradation, when SSD used as hardware.

So, we are recommending swap file usage on Linux.

Its size should be minimum half of the RAM size. For example if you have 64 GB RAM, then you should choose minimum 32 GB swap file size. 64 GB will be better.

Swappiness​

The swappiness parameter configures how often your system swaps data out of RAM to the swap space. So, it's an important setting for swap usage and affects performance.

10 is recommended value for swappiness.

📚 For details on how to configure swap and swappiness parameter, follow guide in here.

Installation​

1. Download​

You need to have the following tools installed on your system:

  • curl
  • unzip

Download the latest self-hosted Appcircle package.

curl -O -L https://cdn.appcircle.io/self-hosted/appcircle/appcircle-server-linux-x64-3.14.0.zip

Extract self-hosted Appcircle package into folder.

unzip -o -u appcircle-server-linux-x64-3.14.0.zip -d appcircle-server

Change directory into extracted appcircle-server folder for following steps.

cd appcircle-server

2. Packages​

You need to have the following tool(s) installed on your system.

  • docker

The good news is that the ac-self-hosted.sh script installs all the necessary tools if they are not already installed on your system.

caution

You need to have root access on your system for this step. Being able to run sudo is sufficient for the following step. (sudoer)

To do this, execute the script using the -i argument as shown below.

sudo ./ac-self-hosted.sh -i

You can also use the long option --install-package for the same purpose.

Make sure the script was executed without any error. Script will print installed and required packages when executed. Some packages may need manual installation on some linux distributions. Check command output for warnings and follow directives given in the output.

info

Docker engine is one of our major dependencies. So, its version is also important for Appcircle server runtime.

Older docker versions may be incompatible for our operations. Docker versions above 20.10.11 should be preferred to eliminate any compatibility issues.

If your linux distribution has an out of date docker version, please update distribution's package repository or install latest docker from here.

caution

Docker Engine Installation​

Self-hosted Appcircle server is only compatible with official installation methods listed in here.

On some Linux distributions you can select docker engine at setup stage, but it's not recommended since some distributions have unofficial installation methods.

For instance, when you select docker engine at setup on Ubuntu installation, Ubuntu installs docker engine via snap which will result with an incompatible docker installation.

In this case, you should not include docker engine to Ubuntu installation. If you want, you can install docker engine later with official installation steps.

Or, as a better choice, you can leave docker engine installation to self-hosted Appcircle server installation script since we have automated installation for Debian derivatives which include apt package manager.

info

You can install docker on RHEL 8.6 and later with the command below:

curl -sSL -o install-docker.sh "https://storage.googleapis.com/appcircle-dev-common/self-hosted/rpm-packages/install-docker.sh" && \
chmod +x install-docker.sh && \
./install-docker.sh
info

Self-hosted Appcircle server is only compatible with docker compose V2 and the new docker compose command.

The new compose V2, which supports the compose command as part of the docker CLI, is available with latest docker versions.

If you installed docker previously by yourself to the system, please verify that docker compose plugin is also installed correctly by checking the version.

docker compose version

If docker-compose-plugin is missing in your system, follow its docs to install docker compose V2 manually.

Change the Docker Data Location​

In certain scenarios, you may encounter situations where the available free space on the root directory (/) is limited. However, you might have ample free space in a different directory, such as $HOME or /opt.

In such cases, you can modify the Docker data location path to utilize the available space in the desired directory.

These are the steps to change docker data location path:

  • Stop the docker engine.
sudo systemctl stop docker
  • Move the existing Docker data directory to the new location.
sudo mv /var/lib/docker $HOME/docker
  • Create a softlink from default location to the new location.
sudo ln -s $HOME/docker /var/lib/docker
  • Start the docker engine.
sudo systemctl start docker

3. Configure​

First we need to find a name to our self-hosted Appcircle installation. It will be the unique project name.

./ac-self-hosted.sh -n "${YOUR_PROJECT}" export

Let's assume we have company named as Space Tech. Then our project name can be "spacetech". For following steps, we will give examples based on this fictive company for better understanding.

Then our command to execute will be:

./ac-self-hosted.sh -n "spacetech" export

On ac-self-hosted.sh execution complete, the folder contains global.yaml, user-secret files and export folder.

projects
└── spacetech
    ├── export
    ├── generated-secret.yaml
    ├── global.yaml
    └── user-secret

At this point, the compose.yaml file is generated in projects/${YOUR_PROJECT}/export path. But some custom environment variables are not configured for your environment. So we need to configure them.

global.yaml and user-secret files are standard yaml files to configure custom variables for your environment.

global.yaml file is in human-readable form but user-secret is in base64 encoded form.

You can keep all your environment variables in global.yaml but if you don't want to keep some secrets visible in global.yaml, you should keep them in user-secret.

caution

user-secret is a complementary file for global.yaml. Although it's usage is optional, it's used actively when it has defined values.

So, keep in mind that values kept in user-secret always overrides same values in global.yaml.

If you want a secret used from global.yaml, then it should not be in user-secret. You should remove its definition from user-secret.

global.yaml has some initial and example values preset when it's generated.

---
environment: Production
enableErrorHandling: "true"
external:
  scheme: http
  mainDomain: ".example.com"

smtpServer:
  user:
  from:
  host:
  fromDisplayName:
  port:
  ssl:
  auth:
  starttls:
keycloak:
  initialUsername: admin@example.com
  enabledRegistration: true
storeWeb:
  external:
    subdomain: store
  customDomain:
    enabled: true
    domain: store.example.com
caution

In later steps, other system subdomains will be concatted to main domain. For this reason, external.mainDomain in configuration file must always begin with . character as prefix.

You can see a list of these subdomains in here.

As an example, we can change some variables like below according to our fictive company setup.

---
environment: Production
enableErrorHandling: "true"
external:
  scheme: http
  mainDomain: ".appcircle.spacetech.com"

smtpServer:
  user: o***y*****@v******.net
  from: o***y*****@v******.net
  host: smtp.v******.net
  fromDisplayName: Space Tech
  port: "587"
  ssl: "false"
  auth: "true"
  starttls: "true"
keycloak:
  initialUsername: admin@spacetech.com
  enabledRegistration: true
storeWeb:
  external:
    subdomain: store
  customDomain:
    enabled: true
    domain: store.spacetech.com

For our example, we configured below values:

  • external.scheme is configured as http for our case. When we set as https we also need to configure other SSL options. See related section in online docs for SSL configuration details.
  • external.mainDomain is set as a subdomain of our example company's main domain. See DNS Settings for more details.
  • smtpServer settings are set for e-mail notifications. We choose not to set SMTP password as plain text in here. We will put it to user-secret on next steps. But if it's acceptable for you, then you can set smtpServer.password variable in here.
  • keycloak.initialUsername will be appcircle's default organization's admin user. Its username is set to initialUsername. We choose not to set its password as plain text in here. We will put it to user-secret on next steps. But if it's acceptable for you, then you can set keycloak.initialPassword variable in here.
  • storeWeb.customDomain.domain is set with our example company's store domain. It's used for enterprise app store URL.
caution

Initial Password​

keycloak.initialPassword value can not be empty since default organization's admin user will login with that password.

Same as in cloud, it must be compatible with Appcircle password policy;

  • minimum character length must be at least 6
  • must contain at least one lower case character
  • must contain at least one upper case character
  • must contain at least one numerical digit

Troubleshooting​

If keycloak.initialPassword value is not compatible with password policy, you will get below error on service start while running Appcircle server.

service "keycloak_migration" didn't completed successfully: exit 1

In this case, before updating initial password in global.yaml, you need to stop partially started docker services with below command. See reset configuration section for more details.

./ac-self-hosted.sh -n "spacetech" reset

After updating initial password, to activate changes, you need to do fresh export.

./ac-self-hosted.sh -n "spacetech" export

Now you can run services again. It should complete without any error.

./ac-self-hosted.sh -n "spacetech" up

As seen in above items, we choose to set some secrets in user-secret file. So we need to take additional steps to complete configuration. If you set them as plain text in global.yaml then you don't need to take user-secret steps.

First create your secret yaml configuration as plain text like below.

smtpServer:
  password: 4NZ**********
keycloak:
  initialPassword: ZP6***********

For example, let's assume our secret yaml file is located in projects/spacetech/secret.yaml path.

In order to convert it to base64 encoded user-secret run following command.

base64 projects/spacetech/secret.yaml > projects/spacetech/user-secret

You can check user-secret file content in human-readable form with below command if required.

base64 -d projects/spacetech/user-secret

We have user-secret filled in successfully and don't need projects/spacetech/secret.yaml anymore. So we should delete it.

rm projects/spacetech/secret.yaml
caution

On your first export, which makes global.yaml template for you, also creates an empty template file for user-secret as seen below:

base64 -d projects/spacetech/user-secret
smtpServer:
  password:
keycloak:
  initialPassword:

If you prefer defining above variables in global.yaml, then they should not be in user-secret.

If you defined all of them in global.yaml,simply remove user-secret before next steps.

Note that after changes made to yaml files, you must execute the script again for the changes to take effect as shown below.

./ac-self-hosted.sh -n "spacetech" export

4. DNS Settings​

Appcircle server has some subdomains for different services. So, you need to add them to DNS in your network before running server.

  • api
  • auth
  • dist
  • hook
  • my
  • resource
  • store
  • (optional) Enterprise App Store's Custom Domain
info

If your configuration (global.yaml) has setting storeWeb.customDomain.enabled:true, it means that you will use a custom domain for Enterprise App Store. So, its value (storeWeb.customDomain.domain) must be configured on DNS along with other system subdomains.

Below is an example DNS configuration that is compatible with our sample scenario.

If you have a dedicated DNS, adding subdomains will be enough to run self-hosted Appcircle server in an easy and quick way.

You can also make DNS settings later, when you complete all configuration and testing.

Until you're satisfied with your setup, you can use /etc/hosts file for both self-hosted Appcircle server and connected clients. You can run whole system, test all functionality and your configuration with using the /etc/hosts file.

Following section will give you the details for this use case.

Using hosts file for DNS Settings​

The hosts file contains the Internet Protocol (IP) host names and addresses for the local host and other hosts in the network. This file is used to resolve a name into an address (that is, to translate a host name into its IP).

So, you can use hosts file like DNS by adding all required subdomains with their mapped IP address.

info

Hosts file is located at:

  • /etc/hosts on Linux and MacOS
  • C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on Windows

Entries in the hosts file have the following format:

Address  HostName

On self-hosted Appcircle server, you should add below entries to the /etc/hosts file.

0.0.0.0  api.appcircle.spacetech.com
0.0.0.0  auth.appcircle.spacetech.com
0.0.0.0  dist.appcircle.spacetech.com
0.0.0.0  hook.appcircle.spacetech.com
0.0.0.0  my.appcircle.spacetech.com
0.0.0.0  resource.appcircle.spacetech.com
0.0.0.0  store.appcircle.spacetech.com
0.0.0.0  store.spacetech.com

For clients that will connect to self-hosted Appcircle server, either self-hosted runners or end-users using their browsers for web UI, should add external IP of the server to their /etc/hosts files. External IP is the address of self-hosted Appcircle server that other hosts in the network can reach to server using that address.

You can get external IP of self-hosted Appcircle server with below command.

hostname -I | awk '{print $1}'

Let's assume we got value 35.241.181.2 as an example.

Other clients that connect to the server should add below entries to their /etc/hosts files.

35.241.181.2  api.appcircle.spacetech.com
35.241.181.2  auth.appcircle.spacetech.com
35.241.181.2  dist.appcircle.spacetech.com
35.241.181.2  hook.appcircle.spacetech.com
35.241.181.2  my.appcircle.spacetech.com
35.241.181.2  resource.appcircle.spacetech.com
35.241.181.2  store.appcircle.spacetech.com
35.241.181.2  store.spacetech.com

With this network setup, you can run and test both self-hosted Appcircle server and connected self-hosted runners with all functionality.

5. Run Server​

Appcircle server's modules are run on Docker Engine as a container application on your system. All containers are run using a compose.yaml file which is generated after ac-self-hosted.sh is executed successfully explained in above steps.

projects/${YOUR_PROJECT}/export path will have all exported environment for self-hosted Appcircle services along with compose.yaml.

projects/
└── spacetech
    ├── export
    │   ├── agent-cache
    │   ├── api-gateway
    │   ├── build
    │   ├── common.env
    │   ├── compose.yaml
    │   ├── distribution
    │   ├── keycloak
    │   ├── keycloak-migration
    │   ├── license
    │   ├── minio
    │   ├── mongo
    │   ├── nginx
    │   ├── notification
    │   ├── postgres
    │   ├── report
    │   ├── rijndael
    │   ├── signing-identity
    │   ├── store
    │   ├── store-submit
    │   ├── tester-web
    │   ├── vault
    │   ├── webApp
    │   └── webhook
    ├── generated-secret.yaml
    ├── global.yaml
    └── user-secret

Run Appcircle server services.

./ac-self-hosted.sh -n "spacetech" up
info

Artifact Registry Credentials: Cred.json​

Before we run self-hosted appcircle, we need to set artifact registry credentials. Using credentials JSON key file, we will pull docker images for Appcircle server services.

Although it's not required immediately at configuration steps, it's required while we're starting Appcircle server. Otherwise it can not pull docker images from our artifact registry.

For this reason, it's a part of the configuration. ac-self-hosted.sh bash script configures docker engine with appropriate credentials. If you don't have the key file, bash script gives error with a detailed message about the requirement.

When you buy an enterprise license for self-hosted appcircle, you will get a credentials JSON key file which enables you to login our artifact registry. For example, assume our fictive company is Space Tech.

You've got space-tech-cred.json key file and downloaded it into ~/Downloads folder.

First you need to copy that key file into self-hosted Appcircle root directory.

cp ~/Downloads/space-tech-cred.json cred.json

After that you can execute below command.

./ac-self-hosted.sh -n "spacetech" up

You should see

"Docker login cred not found. Trying to login now..."

in command output and then

"Login Succeeded"

which shows us successful artifact registry login.

If you get any error for some reason at this step, you can remove ~/.docker/config file to reset and execute same command again to retake same steps.

info

At first run, it will pull once all docker images needed from artifact registry. Also there are some migration steps taken for once which prepares system for other operations.

So it may need up to ~20 min to system be up according to your internet connection speed and CPU power. But recurrent boots will take a couple of minutes and will have shorter durations.

Now you can check system health and gain an overview of the status.

./ac-self-hosted.sh -n "spacetech" check

It will give a quick health summary. You should see below message on success.

 All services are running successfully. Project name is spacetech

If you want to get details about docker services, you may run the following commands.

cd projects/spacetech/export
docker compose ps

If everything is okay, then you should see service statuses as "running", "running (healthy)" or "exited (0)".

caution

Vault​

All secret data, including the API keys, signing identities, environment variables, and secrets are stored in an HashiCorp Vault. OAuth tokens and SSH keys, used in build pipeline, are also stored securely in HashiCorp Vault.

Vault is a tool for securely accessing secrets. It's an important and required service for whole self-hosted Appcircle server. If it's status is unhealthy, secrets will be inaccessible and most CI/CD functions won't work properly.

For this reason, before starting to use self-hosted Appcircle server within your organization, make sure you check vault service status in container list above. Its status must be healthy.

While you're working on configuration back and forth, it's status may become unhealthy in some way.

In this case, stop all services with data cleanup.

./ac-self-hosted.sh -n "spacetech" reset

Then make a new export and start services. Refer to reset configuration section for more details.

info

Self-hosted Appcircle server uses some ports for communication.

Below ports must be unused on system and dedicated to only Appcircle server usage.

  • 80
  • 443

You can get a list of up-to-date ports used by docker with below command.

sudo netstat -tulpn | grep LISTEN | grep docker

Using 3rd Party or Self-hosted Artifact Registry​

If your organization uses another registry (harbor, nexus, etc.), in order to use the Appcircle registry, you can head to the External Image Registries document for detailed usage and configuration examples.

🎉 Ready​

Open your browser and go to URL http://my.appcircle.spacetech.com. You should see login page.

Login to self-hosted Appcircle with initialUsername and initialPassword that we have configured in above steps. For our example, user name is admin@spacetech.com.

You can also login to enterprise app store with configured custom URL store.spacetech.com.

info

Although you can run export multiple times with different project names, you can run only one of them as an Appcircle server instance.

With default installation steps, reserved ports are the same for all exports. For this reason, when you run docker compose up -d first instance will reserve open ports to itself. And later docker compose up -d commands for other projects will get errors like "port is already allocated".

info

For now, self-hosted Appcircle server is a single node solution. You can not scale it by adding more nodes with other bare-metals or VMs.

Because it has a self-contained architecture with all its data side-by-side its docker services. Every node can only use its internal volumes and data on host.

Reset Configuration​

If you have made a mistake at installation steps, especially at configuration, you can reconfigure your server after installation.

All configuration updates requires Appcircle server restart. So resetting configuration should start with stopping Appcircle server.

Stop Appcircle server services.

./ac-self-hosted.sh -n "spacetech" down

On complete, you can check list of running services with command below.

./ac-self-hosted.sh -n "spacetech" check

Its response should be something like below.

WARNING:Services are not started. Project name is spacetech

caution

Some configuration changes may require data cleanup with extra steps which means data loss if you use Appcircle server for some time.

For example, you can add other git providers with above steps any time you want without any data loss. But changing external.scheme from "http" to "https" or changing smtpServer.* settings requires docker volume prune which results with data cleanup.

So, we suggest you to be sure with your configuration before using it in production environment. You can try different settings back and forth until you're satisfied.

To begin reconfiguration with data cleanup, use below command while stopping Appcircle server.

./ac-self-hosted.sh -n "spacetech" reset

It will remove all unused local volumes which is useful for a clean start.

Then go back to your configuration and change settings as done previously at configure step.

When you're ready for a new export, in root directory execute below command again as done previously.

info

For our example scenario, root directory is appcircle-server as seen here. And project name is "spacetech".

./ac-self-hosted.sh -n "spacetech" export

Now you are ready to restart self-hosted appcircle.

Run Appcircle server services.

/ac-self-hosted.sh -n "spacetech" up

Connecting Runners​

When you complete installation successfully by following above steps, you're ready for your first build. 🎉

But in order to run build pipelines, you need to install and connect self-hosted runners. We have dedicated section for installation and configuration of self-hosted runners.

Follow and apply related guidelines in here.

Self-hosted runner section in docs, has all details about runners and their configuration.

caution

By default, self-hosted runner package has pre-configured ASPNETCORE_BASE_API_URL for Appcircle-hosted cloud.

  • https://api.appcircle.io/build/v1

☝ You need to change its value with your self-hosted Appcircle server's API URL.

Assuming our sample scenario explained above, its value should be

  • http://api.appcircle.spacetech.com/build/v1

for our example configuration.

🎗 After download, open appsettings.json with a text editor and change ASPNETCORE_BASE_API_URL value according to your configuration.

Please note that, you should do this before register.

Considering system performance, it will be good to install self-hosted runners to other machines. Self-hosted Appcircle server should run on a dedicated machine itself.

You can install any number of runners regarding to your needs and connect them to self-hosted Appcircle server.