Deployment

[DakotaNelson]

Right now the API lives on Heroku, but it's not ready to be exposed outside of the Olin network (it may never be) due to security and privacy concerns - if it's in the network, we can "move fast and break things" without the broken things involving leaking private and sensitive student data to the world.

Perhaps something like Dokku running on a server in the library could allow for a Heroku-like development experience, but one restricted to access from inside Olin's network? (or perhaps Herokuish can help? who knows)

[DakotaNelson]

(Note that this means the API as a whole won't be available to random student Heroku apps, since they'll be coming from the outside internet. This seems unfortunate. Maybe there's a way to put the API on Heroku but put a WAF in front of it so that only requests with a certain header or something can get through? Or maybe the solution is to make Dokku available so that "random student Heroku apps" become "random student Dokku apps inside the Olin network" - but then, how do you e.g. receive webooks? This could use some thought.)

[DakotaNelson]

(Or maybe the answer is "make the API better so that it can be on Heroku".)