Deploying Gel to DigitalOcean​

Prerequisites​

• gel CLI (install)

• DigitalOcean account

Click the button below and follow the droplet creation workflow on DigitalOcean to deploy an Gel instance.

By default, the admin password is gelpassword; let's change that to something more secure. First, find your droplet's IP address on the DigitalOcean dashboard and assign it to an environment variable IP.

$ 

IP=<your-droplet-ip>

Then use the read command to securely assign a value to the PASSWORD environment variable.

$ 

echo -n "> " && read -s PASSWORD

Use these variables to change the password for the default role admin.

$ 
  
  
  
  

printf gelpassword | gel query \
    --host $IP \
    --password-from-stdin \
    --tls-security insecure \
    "alter role admin set password := '${PASSWORD}'"

OK: ALTER ROLE

$ 

echo gel://admin:$PASSWORD@$IP > dsn.txt

$ 

gel --dsn <dsn> --tls-security insecure

gel>

$ 
  
  
  
  

gel instance link \
  --dsn <dsn> \
  --trust-tls-cert \
  --non-interactive \
  my_instance

Authenticating to gel://admin@1.2.3.4:5656/main
Trusting unknown server certificate:
SHA1:1880da9527be464e2cad3bdb20dfc430a6af5727
Successfully linked to remote instance. To connect run:
  gel -I my_instance

$ 

gel -I my_instance

gel>

Prerequisites​

• gel CLI (install)

• DigitalOcean account

• doctl CLI (install)

• jq (install)

Create a managed PostgreSQL instance​

If you already have a PostgreSQL instance you can skip this step.

$ 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

DSN="$( \
    doctl databases create gel-postgres \
        --engine pg \
        --version 14 \
        --size db-s-1vcpu-1gb \
        --num-nodes 1 \
        --region sfo3 \
        --output json \
    | jq -r '.[0].connection.uri' )"

Provision a droplet​

Replace $SSH_KEY_IDS with the ids for the ssh keys you want to ssh into the new droplet with. Separate multiple values with a comma. You can list your keys with doctl compute ssh-key list. If you don't have any ssh keys in your DigitalOcean account you can follow this guide to add one now.

$ 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

IP="$( \
    doctl compute droplet create gel \
        --image gel \
        --region sfo3 \
        --size s-2vcpu-4gb \
        --ssh-keys $SSH_KEY_IDS \
        --format PublicIPv4 \
        --no-header \
        --wait )"

Configure the backend Postgres DSN. To simplify the initial deployment, let's instruct Gel to run in insecure mode (with password authentication off and an autogenerated TLS certificate). We will secure the instance once things are up and running.

$ 

printf "GEL_SERVER_BACKEND_DSN=${DSN} \
\nGEL_SERVER_SECURITY=insecure_dev_mode\n" \
| ssh root@$IP -T "cat > /etc/gel/env"

$ 

ssh root@$IP "systemctl restart gel.service"

Set the superuser password.

$ 

echo -n "> " && read -s PASSWORD

$ 
  

gel -H $IP --tls-security insecure query \
    "alter role admin set password := '$PASSWORD'"

OK: ALTER ROLE

Set the security policy to strict.

$ 

printf "GEL_SERVER_BACKEND_DSN=${DSN} \
\nGEL_SERVER_SECURITY=strict\n" \
| ssh root@$IP -T "cat > /etc/gel/env"

$ 

ssh root@$IP "systemctl restart gel.service"

$ 

apt-get update && apt-get install --only-upgrade gel-server-6

$ 

systemctl restart gel

That's it! Refer to the Construct the DSN section above to connect to your instance.

Health Checks​

Using an HTTP client, you can perform health checks to monitor the status of your Gel instance. Learn how to use them with our health checks guide.