Deploying BluePepper¶

BluePepper simply uses git to handle the version of the codebase that gets deployed across your team. As a result, downloading BluePepper is basically a git clone command, and updating it is basically a git fetch / git checkout.

This section explains how to set up git for this purpose.

Setting Up A Personal Access Token¶

To ensure users can clone and update the repository without being able to push code and without having to create a git account, a Personal Access Token (PAT) has to be created.

• On github, go to your user settings

  

• At the very bottom, go to Developer Settings -> Personal access tokens -> Fine-grained tokens (you may have to verify your request with 2FA)

  

• Setup your token. Most importantly:

  • Set its name
  • Set an expiration date
  • Restrict the scope to a single repository
  • In Permissions, add Contents
  • Ensure the Content's access is set to Read-only
  • Press Generate token

  

Download and Install Script¶

The script conf/deploy_enduser.bat is designed to provide a simple and efficient way to deploy BluePepper to your team. One just needs to provide the URL to the git repository and the Personal Access Token. You have two ways of doing that:

• Edit the conf/deploy_enduser.bat to set the environment variables BLUEPEPPER_GIT_URL and BLUEPEPPER_GIT_PAT

  SET BLUEPEPPER_GIT_URL=https://github.com/your-username/bluepepper_myproject.git
  SET BLUEPEPPER_GIT_PAT=your_readonly_personal_access_token
  

• Edit the conf/deploy_enduser.bat and remove the lines SET BLUEPEPPER_GIT_URL= and SET BLUEPEPPER_GIT_PATH=

  • Since the required values are not written in the file, you will have to set the environment variables yourself on the user's computer
  • As the Personal Access Token only has read-only permissions, this shouldn't be too much of a security issue, but you may prefer this option if confidentiality is important for you.

Updating BluePepper¶

When BluePepper is launched, the update happens during the splash screen. The update consists of a git fetch and git pull to get all changes made to the repository, and a git checkout to set the repository in a specific state.

By default, the update checks out the main branch, but you can specify the branch, the commit, or the tag to check out in the conf/deployment.json file.

{
    "checkout" : "main"
}

{
    "checkout" : "my_feature_branch"
}

{
    "checkout" : "tags/v0.0.5"
}

{
    "checkout" : "3df878d3619d8aaf836c0b77e1c3a7b3ee124519"
}