chao's clips tagged capistrano

Capistrano & EC2 Sitting in a Tree, K I S S I N G « Niblets….Simple. Less.

chao — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 04:51:37 -0000

Clipped by chao to play with amazon's ec2

Capistrano & EC2 Sitting in a Tree, K I S S I N G

12Feb07

I am using EC2 to host my soon-to-launch Quizical.net application. Its great.

I use capistrano to manage these EC2 instances. With these tasks, I have automated many sets of EC2 commands into simple rake tasks.

For instance, to launch an instance, I can type…

rake ec2:run id=ami-61a54008

. ..and a minute or two later I have a new instance running.

Then to install my rails app, I type…

cap initial_install

…which

patches this instance with things I need;
starts my litespeed web server;
installs my app from subversion;
creates my databases;
writes my database.yaml
runs my migrations
imports my database from S3
restarts my server

So in a few minutes, I’ve got my app running on a newly commissioned server! Awesome.

Testing and Debugging Ruby on Rails: Running Tests on Deploy with Capistrano

chao — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 02:24:15 -0000

Clipped by chao to develop a ruby on rails web app

I was shocked to discover that Capistrano doesn’t run the tests by default on deploy. The coolest part of capistrano isn’t even turned on. Beyond that, it’s not even documented in the capistrano manual. So, i’m here to fill the gap.

The first thing to do is a task for running the tests.


desc "Run the full tests on the deployed app." 
task :run_tests do
 run "cd #{release_path} && rake db:test:prepare" 
 run "cd #{release_path} && rake" 
end

desc "Run pre-symlink tasks" 
task :before_symlnk do
  run_tests
end

Capistrano - shared resources

chao — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 18:02:38 -0000

Clipped by chao to develop a ruby on rails web app

Converting a Rails App to Capistrano deployment

Posted by Danger 29 days ago

I’ve got one client for whom I’m building a Rails app and I started it long before I knew anything about Capistrano. Mostly things are pretty straightforward and all is working as it should - but there are a couple of hangups.

Shared Resources

My site allows users to upload portraits of themselves. These are kept right in the open in the public directory under a folder named “portraits”. They can also upload films, documents, etc. using the model Documents which stores its stuff in ./public/documents.

The first real hassle of converting to capistrano was dealing with these because up until now I’ve kept them in the SVN repository for fear of losing any data and pisisng off a user. With the number of deployments I do I no longer want to put these files in the repository but that would remove them from the site. Capistrano does a fresh checkout each time it deploys and if something’s not in SVN then it just plain doesn’t make it back into the app.

Capistrano does allow the use of a shared folder located above the live app directory. The trick is getting stuff into there and making sure that capistrano can recognize it every time I deploy.

My Solution

It turns out the Capistrano allows highly configurable deployment options. All I needed to do was to move the folders out of ./public and into shared

mv ./public/documents ../shared/
mv ./public/portraits ../shared/

then edit my deploy script so it links those folders up into each new public directory

task :after_update_code do
  %w{documents portraits}.each do |share|
    run "ln -s #{shared_path}/#{share} #{release_path}/public/#{share}"
  end
end

It didn’t take long for me to realize that I needed to do the same with any other file that wouldn’t be in SVN. For me, this is my database.yml file and cofig/environment.rb file

task :after_update_code do
  %w{documents portraits}.each do |share|
    run "ln -s #{shared_path}/#{share} #{release_path}/public/#{share}"
  end
  %w{database.yml environment.rb}.each do |config|
    run "ln -nfs #{shared_path}/#{config} #{release_path}/config/#{config}"
  end
end

There’s actually a number of tasks that you could add this code to. You could put it right into the deploy task by using task :deploy or you could make it run immediately after deploy is run by task :after_deploy

So far so good with Capistrano.