Cheap and easy Silverstripe hosting

01/04/2024

Using Digital Ocean's App platform to host a managed Silverstripe site on the cheap

Setup steps

The indented audience of this post is those that know what Silverstripe is, and how to install it locally. But just in case you do not know what I’m banging on about I’ll give a quick SilverStripe primer.

SilverStripe is a open source MVC style CMS and Framework written in PHP, and using a Mysql Database. Think of the Framework as similar to Laravel, but a bit more shit. And the CMS bit as like Wordpress, also a bit more shit. Not that I have much love for Wordpress, but’s that another story.

So, where was I… There is a sweet spot there which is actually quite nice, that I haven’t seen done in other projects in this space. SilverStripe is conceptually similar to MVC style frameworks like Laravel for PHP, Rail’s for Ruby, Django for python and perhaps Phoenix for Elixir. I have often wondered if you use such frameworks for client work in a fast moving web agency setting? My naive understanding is that these frameworks do have compatible CMS’s but they are added later as a nicety, not being core to the Framework exactly. SilverStripe has evolved from the get go with a CMS, and as such, is tightly integrated ecosystem.

As much as us devs love getting swept up in the new hotness like writing our web content in markdown, pushing to Github then having our fancy Jam stack’ish venture funded SAAS build and deploy our static’ish sites to the ‘edge’.

Clients ain’t having that nonsense, they just want something as similar to Microsoft Word as possible. Clients seek familiarity, they want to edit some text, add a title or two, and see those changes instantly appear on their website.

So enter Silverstripe, it’s sweet spot is for building non trivial data driven websites using custom design’s. It’s great at building out relational data schemas (like one to many, many to many etc), quickly. Then the backend UI almost works out of the box which allowing clients to edit those data structures. I’m probably doing a terrible job at selling you; dear reader; on the merits of Silverstripe. But If I have sparked your interest, I think the lessons page in the docs would be a good next step.

If I sound a little bitter, I may be. I have spent probably 90% of my dev career working on Silverstripe websites of all sizes and complexities. I would like to move on from Silverstripe at this stage. But gosh darn, It’s still such a great solution for many of the projects that come my way. Just when I think I’m out I keep getting pulled back in

So anyhoo

Step 1: install and run Silverstripe locally

composer create-project silverstripe/installer my-website

If you are on a Mac, and need to install Php/Apache/Mysql working locally, my go to guide is from the folks a Get Grav

There is much more info on installing SilverStripe on the Silverstripe docs

Once Silverstripe is working good locally, and have the repo in Github, move on to step two.

Step 2: Set up Digital Ocean

Create an account on Digital Ocean if you don’t already have one. Create a project called the name of you website Then smash that ‘Create App’ button on the App Platform page, and create a app You may want to create one of their projects first to keep it all organised. You will also need to create a managed mySql instance. This is because the App platform does not give you Mysql unfortunately. it gives you it’s more idealised cousin Postgres.

And in case you are thinking, oh shit, that’s not a problem because I’m sure Silverstripe has a Postgres module, I’ll just composer install that bad boy and happy days. Down that path, there be dragons, I tried the best part of a couple of hours getting that to work, but no dice. Didn’t help that I didn’t have Postgres installed locally and couldn’t be arsed to. But further digging, the port number in the Postgres module seems to be unconfigurable, and you need a exotic port for the App platform. Nothing a fork and pull request couldn’t fix. But I took the step back at that point and asked if there was a faster way. Turns out there was, and that was just spinning up a managed Mysql database outside of the App platforms offerings. So go ahead and spin up a managed Mysql instance.

Step 3: Set up environment variables

Once you have everything set up in Digital ocean. You will need to plug in some Environment variables into the app platform Here a run down on them

SS_DATABASE_CLASS=MySQLDatabase
SS_DATABASE_SERVER=db-mysql-syd1-xxxx-do-user-266434-0.c.db.ondigitalocean.com
SS_DATABASE_PORT=xxxx
SS_DATABASE_USERNAME=doadmin
SS_DATABASE_PASSWORD=xxxxxx
SS_DATABASE_NAME=defaultdb

The database credentials form the managed Mysql instance you set up earlier. (replace the xxxx’s with you own creds of course )

SS_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE=live
SS_FLUSH_ON_DEPLOY=true
SS_DEFAULT_ADMIN_USERNAME=admin
SS_DEFAULT_ADMIN_PASSWORD=xxxxxx
SS_DATABASE_TIMEZONE=Pacific/Auckland
TZ=Pacific/Auckland
SS_BASE_URL=https://elp-bookings-c35eo.ondigitalocean.app

Some SilverStripe specific stuff, usually I only use the SS_DEFAULT_ADMIN on dev, but I needed a quick way to get into the admin area of Silverstripe after deploy. The Base URL was just the spun up URL that the App platform gave me, guess you would change that as part of the steps of pointing a custom domain to it. I didn’t get that far.

MAILER_DSN=smtp://resend:[email protected]:465

Here if you want the site to send emails, you can set up a smtp mailer service. Resend looked good, but I never got this far along in the process anyway. You will need a real domain to do this as whatever SMTP service you use will want you put put some of that email MX records and other stuff on the DNS of your custom domain.

build command: vendor/bin/sake dev/build "flush=1"

You should also put the above command in the build command option, this will run after each deploy. And SilverStripe needs that dev/build run manually if there are schema changes in you’re Silverstripe project.

step 4: Check if https is working

That just step here, well at least it was for me. This might not be necessarily if you set up a custom domain to point to your App platform instance. Which I also didn’t get to, as it was just me kicking the tires. But the olf HTTPS thing didn’t quite work with Silverstripe and the platform. Even with SilverStripe’s force HTTPS option. After source diving I found that adjusting the alternate_base_url config value did the trick. Seems that configuration variable is supposed to be used for testing, but in this case it fixed the HTTPS issue I was having. So if you are following on, place the following on your _config.php file. Replacing the domain with your own


// app/_config.php

<?php

use SilverStripe\Control\Director;

if (!Director::isDev()) {
    Director::config()->set('alternate_base_url', 'https://xxxx-c35eo.ondigitalocean.app');
}

(Or in your apps _config.yml file)

Hopefully you got that set up faster than I did. I had it running for a month and got charged about $40 NZD’s for the privilege. Now of course just setting up a fresh droplet and installing your own LAMP stack on it would be cheaper, and is something I have done in the past. But this seems to be a great way to get a Silverstripe site running without to much hassle, and with not having to worry too much about keeping Linux/mySql/Apache up to date and configured well for security and speed. I don’t know how well a App platforms hosted Silverstripe site will perform under load, but Hopefully it’s a cost efficient way of having a somewhat managed Silverstripe hosting.

Cam out.