Openminds Deploy Gem

This is a set of defaults for deploying to the Openminds shared hosting servers. These include our best practices for deployment, and should make a very clean Capfile.

Installation

These deploy recipes are all available in the openminds_deploy gem, which can be installed via rubygems:

gem install openminds_deploy

Available recipes

• openminds_deploy/defaults - Defaults for every deployment.
• openminds_deploy/git - for deploying with git.
• openminds_deploy/svn - for deploying with SVN.
• openminds_deploy/passenger - for deploying to a passenger account (zink, pro-004, pro-005, pro-006, pro-007)
• openminds_deploy/lighttpd - for deploying to a lighttpd account (zuurstof, kobalt, koper)
• openminds_deploy/rails3 - if you're deploying a Rails3 application. Takes care of Bundler

Example recipe

In this recipe we just set-up our user & application-name, the repository (git in this case) where our application can be found, the server we are deploying to, and require the necessary deployment files.

The block around it is a convenience rescue if someone would deploy with this Capfile that doesn't have this gem installed. The require's can be edited like you need.

load 'deploy' if respond_to?(:namespace) # cap2 differentiator

set :user, 'account_name'
set :application, 'my_application'

set :repository, '[email protected]:git/my_application.git'

server 'server.openminds.be', :app, :web, :db, :primary => true

begin
  require 'openminds_deploy/defaults'
  require 'openminds_deploy/git'
  require 'openminds_deploy/passenger'
  require 'openminds_deploy/rails3'
rescue LoadError => e
  $stderr.puts <<INSTALL
There was an exception while trying to deploy your application. Most likely you do not have the openminds_deploy gem installed.
You can install the gem like this:
  gem install openminds_deploy
INSTALL
  $stderr.puts "Exception thrown: #{e}"
  exit 1
end

If you want to override some settings from the openminds_deploy recipes, define them after the openminds block.

...
begin
  require 'openminds_deploy/defaults'
rescue LoadError
  $stderr.puts "Install the openminds_deploy gem"
  exit 1
end

set :deploy_to, "/home/#{user}/apps/staging/#{application}"

Rails 3.1 with asset pipeline

If you deploy a Rails 3.1 application with the default settings, you need to precompile the assets upon deployment. If you are using capistrano >= 2.8.0 you can add the following line to your Capifile:

load 'deploy/assets'

If you are using an older version of capistrano, you should upgrade to a later version. If for some reason you can't do that, you can append these lines to your Capfile:

before "deploy:symlink", "deploy:assets"

namespace :deploy do
  desc "Compile assets"
  task :assets do
    run "cd #{release_path}; RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake assets:precompile"
  end
end

Also, the standard capistrano behavior will try to touch the public/images, public/javascripts, public/stylesheets which will cause warnings. Add this line to the Capfile or deploy.rb to avoid that:

set :normalize_asset_timestamps, false

Recipes in detail

openminds_deploy/defaults

• sets up variables like use_sudo and group_writable
• enables SSH forwarding
• adds a task to link config/database.yml
• automatically checks if new migrations are available and asks you if you want to run them if there are

openminds_deploy/git

• sets up the SCM and enables git-submodules to be installed

openminds_deploy/svn

• sets up the SCM for svn and adds a password-prompt (don't keep your password in your SCM!)

openminds_deploy/passenger

• sets up all stop/start/restart tasks for Passenger

openminds_deploy/lighttpd

• sets up all stop/start/restart tasks for Lighttpd

openminds_deploy/rails3

• sets up bundling tasks with Bundler and does a basic check to see if the server you're on supports Rails 3.
• only precompiles assets if there are changes detected in your assets or Gemfile

openminds_deploy/configs

• gives you some tasks to copy and symlink config files to the server

Example

To set up Faye you might have different configs for each environment (development, staging, production, ...). For doing so you might create the following config in config/faye.yml

development:
  server_url: https://example.dev:9292/faye

staging:
  server_url: https://staging.example.com:9292/faye

production:
  server_url: https://example.com:9292/faye

Once you have that set up, you'll want to create the config during the first deploy and symlink the configs after each deploy. To set that up you'll have to set the configs variable in your Capfile:

set :configs, %w[faye]

Don't forget to require openminds_deploy/configs after setting the variable. That's it, now your configs will be copied and symlinked automatically.