HOWTO: Deploy a Playground

What is a playground

A playground is a temporary deployment of a single node into the cloud (currently on AWS) which all the joystream infrastructure services running on that single machine. Its state is persisted as long as the node remains online (if it is rebooted it much be brought up within a short time period, 2minutes at most for the chain to continue producing blocks without error)

• joystream-node dev chain (single validator - equivalent of running joystream-node --dev) where Alice is sudo and has initial token allocation
• Query Node
• Orion

Optionally

• Configured storage infrastructure, 1 storage node and 1 distributor node
• Configured membership faucet service

Use-case

Deploying a test environment from a given branch for testing runtime and applications in a collaborative way.

What does a playground not provide

The playground does not deploy any front end applications (Pioneer, Atlas, Polkadot-js Apps)
On successful deployment, the Playground URL endpoints for all the infrastructure services are provided so those applications can be configured or pointed at the playground deployment.

Customizability

Currently only option at deployment time is whether to initialize the chain with working group leads and simple storage infrastructure, plus the membership faucet.

How to start a playground

Prerequisites:

• User must have write-access permission on the joystream mono-repo.
• Branch selected for deployment must build (all CI checks passing)
• The "Deploy Playground" action exists on the deployment branch.
• Branch name must conform to AWS valid stack name "[a-zA-Z][-a-zA-Z0-9]*" -> starts with a letter and is followed by zero or more hyphens, letters and/or digits

A playground is deployed through a special github action workflow called "Deploy Playground"

Steps:

1. Visit: https://github.com/Joystream/joystream/actions/workflows/deploy-playground.yml
2. Click on "Run workflow" drop down menu.
3. Customize the settings
   Recommended to use your name as the "additional identifier" that will be prefixed to the stack name.

4. Click "Run workflow" button, then go grab a drink..

Here is an old example run: https://github.com/Joystream/joystream/actions/runs/1962348214

5. Download the endpoints artifact file which will be a zip file containing an endpoints.json file

{"websocket_rpc": "wss://52.91.200.121.nip.io/ws-rpc", "http_rpc": "https://52.91.200.121.nip.io/http-rpc", "colossus": "https://52.91.200.121.nip.io/colossus-1", "distributor": "https://52.91.200.121.nip.io/distributor-1", "graphql_server": "https://52.91.200.121.nip.io/query-node/server/graphql", "graphql_server_websocket": "wss://52.91.200.121.nip.io/query-node/server/graphql", "indexer": "https://52.91.200.121.nip.io/query-node/indexer/graphql", "member_faucet": "https://52.91.200.121.nip.io/member-faucet/register", "orion": "https://52.91.200.121.nip.io/orion/graphql", "config": "https://52.91.200.121.nip.io/network/config.json", "stack_name": "leszek-olympia-26"}

Once you have this endpoint information you can use polkadot-js apps and use custom endpoint wss://52.91.200.121.nip.io/ws-rpc

For pioneer-2 you can use the config endpoint like so*:

https://pioneer-2.vercel.app/#/profile?network-config=https://52.91.200.121.nip.io/network/config.json

TODO: *Need to deploy an instance of pioneer that is not overriding the network-config

Review the existing HOWTO against the Deploy Playground workflow at .github/workflows/deploy-playground.yml and the documented endpoints artifact. Check whether the workflow steps, prerequisites, links, and Pioneer configuration example still match current behavior; done means the deployment instructions are accurate and reproducible.