DineTogether Infrastructure Documentation

Welcome to the complete guide for DineTogether's Kubernetes infrastructure and auto-deployment system.

🚀 What is This?

This infrastructure delivers GitOps-based deployments of DineTogether apps to a single-server Kubernetes (K3s) cluster using Flux and Kustomize.

Key Features

• ✅ Push to deploy (GitOps) – Flux watches Git and applies changes automatically
• ✅ Optional image automation – Flux can bump image tags on new pushes to GHCR
• ✅ Single server – Lightweight K3s cluster
• ✅ Private registry – GitHub Container Registry (GHCR)
• ✅ Automatic TLS – cert-manager + NGINX Ingress Controller
• ✅ Environments – Staging and production overlays

📊 Architecture Overview

graph TD
  A[Developer push] -->|CI build| B[GitHub Actions]
  B -->|push image| C[GHCR]
  C -->|new tag| D[Flux Image Automation]
  D -->|commit tag bump| E[Git (infra repo)]
  E -->|watch| F[Flux Controllers]
  F -->|apply kustomize| G[K3s]
  G -->|serve| H[NGINX Ingress + cert-manager]

🎯 Quick Links

• Quick Start

  Deploy your first app in 5 minutes

• How It Works

  Understand the auto-deployment magic

• Deploy New App

  Add your application to the infrastructure

• Troubleshooting

  Fix common issues quickly

📋 Current Deployments

• Staging URLs (examples):
• Frontend: https://frontend.staging.dinetogether.co.uk
• Backend API: https://api.staging.dinetogether.co.uk
• Docs: https://docs.staging.dinetogether.co.uk

🛠️ Infrastructure Components

Core Technologies

• Kubernetes: K3s (single-node)
• GitOps: Flux + Kustomize
• Ingress: NGINX Ingress Controller
• TLS: cert-manager (Let’s Encrypt)
• Registry: GitHub Container Registry (GHCR)
• CI: GitHub Actions

Repositories

• k8s-infrastructure - This repo with deployment automation
• frontend - Next.js frontend app
• backend - Django backend API
• mobile - Flutter mobile app

🚦 Getting Started

I want to deploy an appI want to understand how it worksI need to debug an issue

Follow our Quick Start Guide to deploy your first application.

Read How It Works to understand the GitOps workflow.

Check Troubleshooting for common problems and solutions.

Need Help?

• 📖 Browse the complete documentation using the navigation
• 🐛 Report issues on GitHub
• 💬 Contact the infrastructure team

📚 Documentation Access

Online Documentation

Documentation is available at:

https://docs.staging.dinetogether.co.uk

Running Locally

For local development:

# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Run the documentation server
mkdocs serve

# Access at: http://localhost:8000

What's Included

• ✅ Complete setup guides
• ✅ Architecture explanations
• ✅ Step-by-step deployment instructions
• ✅ Comprehensive troubleshooting resources
• ✅ API and configuration references
• ✅ 25+ pages of detailed documentation