Capify The Pony

I managed to deploy Jifty apps with Capistrano.

Capistrano is a tool for deploying Rails apps, however, with some small tweaks, it can be used to deploy Jifty apps.

Install it:

gem install capistrano

The first step is to capify your Jifty app:

cd /path/to/AwesomeJiftyApp
mkdir config
capify .

It generates a config/deploy.rb file, which we modify it to satisfy what we need. Here's an example that deploys to example.com:

set :application, "AwesomeJiftyApp"
set :repository,  "git@git.example.com/awesome.git"

set :deploy_to, "/home/apps/awesome"

set :scm, :git
set :use_sudo, false
set :deploy_via, :remote_cache

role :app, "example.com"
role :web, "example.com"
role :db,  "example.com", :primary => true

namespace :deploy do
  desc "Create database.yml and asset packages for production"
  task :after_update_code, :roles => [:web] do
    run "cp -r #{shared_path}/etc/* #{latest_release}/etc/"
  end

  desc "Restart the app is undefined to be a no-op."
  task :restart, :roles => :app, :except => { :no_release => true } do
  end

  task :migrate, :roles => :app do
    run "cd #{latest_release}; bin/jifty schema --setup"
  end

  # Un-define some rails-specific tasks.
  [:start, :stop, :finalize_update].each do |t|
    desc "#{t} task is a no-op."
    task t, :roles => :app do ; end
  end
end

It's pure ruby code. For those Perl programmers who wonder what the do...end means, it mean a code ref like sub { ... }.

Run the setup task. This will create the required directories on the remote host example.com:

cap deploy:setup

In my case, I put site_config.yml, which contains the database username/password setting, to /home/apps/awesome/shared/etc, and copy it over to the latest app dir every time.

Then, run a "cold" start, this will prepare the directory structure and run database migration:

cap deploy:cold

Afterwards, you just git push your code and then run:

cap deploy

Then the latest code will be re-deployed.

The example deploy.rb undefined several rails-specific steps. Including the restart of the server. That will certainly depends on how you config it. You might be able to put:

run "sudo apache2ctl restart"

... in there. If you config your app to be instantiated with apache2 + fastcgi.

Definitely check the Capistrano documentation for more tweaks in deploy.rb setting. This is a practically useful tool, and it shouldn't be difficult to play with.