I've never worked with Capistrano before and currently I am fighting the urge to just scrap it and go back to my old manual ways.
As I understand, Capistrano V3 does not create the initial database because they feel it is the duty of the DB administrator.
So I must be missing something but I have followed their instructions but the initial cap staging deploy fails when it gets to the rake db:migrate step because the database does not exist.
Because of the failure, the symlink for current -> releases never gets created.
Is it just accepted general practice that we SSH into our boxes and cd into the first folder under releases and manually run rake db:create...?
And then from there, am I supposed to just run cap staging deploy again so that it finishes creating the symlinks?
Seems hacky for something that is supposed to make things easier and I am not sure if I am understanding this correctly or not.
Thanks.
It does make sense to leave certain things out of a deployment. As the initial set up and the routine deployments are very separate functions and require different specialties, or in large deployments even different skillsets. That said.. I'm totally with you - on the first deploy having to manually set up the database and certain files (specifically linked files like secrets.yml) is a step that just wastes my time.
I use this plugin:
https://github.com/capistrano-plugins/capistrano-postgresql
just add the require capistrano/postgresql to your capfile as you would any plugin
then run cap staging setup before the first time you run cap staging deploy
Related
I am using Capistrano 3 to deploy my app to the production server.
My server has system wide install of rvm. There is nothing extra ordinary about the deploy script.
However when i run cap production deploy The deploy script gives out successful messages and seems that deploy went without a problem.
However when I check the latest release folder is not updated and only the repo folder is updated.
This was supposed to be much easier while using Capistrano 2. But the respective commands to create symlinks etc all are shown to be passed in the console log while depoying while in the server nothing is being done.
Am I missing something about the capistrano 3 changes.
Ask if you need more information.
Capistrano 3 changed the symlink task, if you overrode it or called it specifically like deploy:create_symlink, you may want to audit your code.
I would like to run cap development deploy:setup and cap development deploy to setup the dev environment for my rails app. In order to do this, I will have to remove the project folder from the remote machine, is there a way to automate this in some fashion using cap.
I basically want to remove the app folder in remote machine before I do a full deploy.
The Capistrano app folder is structured like this:
releases - Contains separate folders (named using commit IDs or timestamps) for each deployment made so far
current - Linked to the latest deployment folder under releases
shared - Shared logs, gem files, and tmp which are used between deployments
Now do you really want to clean the entire app folder? That could be dangerous since you'll lose logs.
current is just a symbolic link, it points to the latest release only.
If you want to clean up old releases, check this answer. You can set keep_releases to 1.
If you want to delete the shared folder as well, then you have to write your own Capistrano hook as #Strik3r mentioned.
before 'deploy:setup', 'removecode'
task :removecode do
run "rm -rf <path>", :shell => fetch(:rvm_shell)
end
add this code in to your deploy.rb file, this will call before deploy:setup
in this way you can create a task and do what ever you want to do
I'm using Capistrano to deploy a Rails application. I'm thinking of a situation where there were database changes, so I can't simply cap deploy because the migrations need to run before the code is updated. I realize there's a cap deploy:migrations, but that's a little more automatic than I'd like. I'd like to:
Push the new code to the releases directory, but not update the symlink or restart the application.
ssh into the server, run rake:db_abort_if_pending_migrations to confirm that the migrations I want to run are the only pending ones, then run rake db:migrate manually.
Complete the deploy, updating the symlink and restarting the application.
Is there any easy way to do this with the built-in Capistrano tasks, or would I need to write my own deployment steps to accomplish this?
I should mention too that I'm thinking of cases (like adding columns) where the migration can be run on a live database. For more destructive changes I realize I'd need to bring down the site with a maintenance page during the deploy.
Try:
cap deploy:update_code
Do what you described loging in to the server manually or via cap
shell
cap deploy:symlink deploy:restart
See cap -e deploy:update_code deploy:symlink deploy:restart deploy:shell for more information.
I hope this will be helpful to You.
This is my first deployment. I did a cap deploy:setup which worked fine.
Then, when I try to execute cap deploy:update I run into error messages. Something along the lines of
rm: cannot remove `/var/www/app_name/current': Is a directory
Here is my capfile and directory permissions.
http://pastie.org/1189919
In general, what is the best practice as far as deployment user and permissions are concerned? Should I use root or create a different user. If a different user what exact permissions does it need?
Thanks
Did you create the directories within /var/www/app_name, or were they created by capistrano?
Regardless, the issue you have is that /var/www/app_name/current should not be a directory - it should be a symlink to the current release within /var/www/app_name/releases/. The failure is caused when capistrano has finished creating the new release folder within /var/www/app_name/releases/, and is trying to symlink /var/www/app_name/current to it.
You might be able to fix your issues by renaming /var/www/app_name/current (so you have a backup if things go wrong), and creating a symlink from /var/www/app_name/current to the most recent release within /var/www/app_name/releases/, and then doing a cap deploy. (Delete your backup of current if this works).
As far as best practice goes whatever you do, do not use root. Instead, set up a user (or use an existing user) that has only permissions to the required directories (didn't read your scripts closely, but probably just /var/www/app_name.
To deploy a new release you should invoke cap deploy or cap deploy:migrations, not cap deploy:update.
I also have had such errors. A totally normal task of updating source code and restarting the server always seems to have problems at various points of the simple script.
Sometimes it complains that a hash value at github doesn't match some expected value, sometimes it won't update a directory because it already exists, but mostly with it wanting to create things that exist.
Is there no way to force Capistrano and thus the shell commands to just DO IT ? I would at least appreciate it asking me what it should do should it encounter this type of error instead of just failing and rolling back. Especially when it's a simple file operation.
I end up having to delete things manually on the server so that the Capistrano script will run without failing. This is obviously not the way forward.
I have a Passenger-based production Rails application which has thousands of users. Occasionally we need to apply a code patch (we use git) and the current process for doing this (you can assume there are no data migrations) is:
Perform git pull origin [production-branch-name] on the server
touch tmp/restart.txt to restart Passenger
This allows us to patch the server without having to resort to putting up a maintenance page, which is great, but it doesn't feel quite right since it's not actually a proper 'deployment', and we still need to manually update the revision file and our deployment doesn't appear in the Hoptoad or NewRelic services we use.
Ideally I would run cap production deploy and just let the standard Capistrano deployment script take care of everything, but is this a dangerous thing to do without putting up a maintenance page? This deployment process seems to be fairly safe in that the new revision is deployed to a completely separate folder and only right at the end of the process is a symlink re-created to switch the currently deployed version, but I'm still fairly paranoid about this somehow resulting in a lost or failed request.
No problems here doing cap production deploy. If the deployment fails then the previous release is still good. Nothing will fail as the old release is loaded (cached) in the current Passenger process. The touch tmp/restart.txt will pick up the new release and all is good in the world.