I've always deployed my apps through SSH by manually logging in and running git pull origin master, running migrations and pre-compiling assets.
Now i started to get more interested in Capistrano so i gave it a try, i setup a recipe with the repository pointing to github and deploy_to to /home/myusername/apps/greatapp
The current app on the server is already hooked up with Git too so i didn't know why i had to specify the github url in the recipe again, but i ran cap deploy which was successful.
The changes didn't apply, so out of curiosity i browsed to the app folder on the server and found out that Capistrano created folders: shared, releases and current. the latter contained the app, so now i have 2 copies one in /home/myusername/apps/greatapp and another in /home/myusername/apps/greatapp/current.
Is this how it should be? and I have to migrate user uploads to current and destroy the old app?
Does Capistrano pull the repo on my localhost then upload it through SSH or run pull on the server? in other words can someone outline how the deployment works?
Does Capistrano run precompile:assets?
/releases/ is for previous versions incase you want to do cap:rollback.
/current/ as you rightly pointed out is for the current version of your app.
/shared/ is for files and folders that you want to persist between deployments, they typically get symlinked to your /current/ folder as part of your recipe.
Capistrano connects to your server in a shell and then executes the git commands on the server.
Capistrano should automatically put anything in public/system (the rails convention for stored user-uploaded files) into the shared directory, and set up the necessary symlinks.
If you put in the github url, it actually fetches from your github repo. Read https://help.github.com/articles/deploying-with-capistrano for more info.
It does, by default.
Related
I have a directory under /public folder with the use of CarrierWave I store all my PDF files under this dir. But the problem is all the time I deploy new version of my Rails app this directory gets cleaned up and the all files are missing. This directory is was set under my uploader.
I also have a directory named "private" which I created manually in order to not to serve sensitive files globally on WEB. Those files also gone after new deployment process.
How can I prevent files from deleting on deploy process?
Thanks.
I assume you are using some automation for deployment. Because if you are updating your code on server instance manually then you can preserve pre uploaded file, but using manually method to update code is not a good practice.
So in automation deployment we generally follow this kind of flow.
Whenever you deploy that create a new deploy version and set that as current version.
Simply that means it's creating a new directory and placing your rails project in it. Now the files you are storing inside the project directory are there in the previous version those are not gone if you are using any linux instance.(Only if you have setup that way to preserve last few versions to restore incase of new deploy is exploded)
Clear till now?
Not suppose you are not keeping any previous version, your files are gone forever.
So it's not a good idea to store any file under project repository.
Best practice is to use bucket system like AWS bucket or Google cloud bucket, where we store all the uploaded file. If having bucket is not in budget, you can choose a different directory on linux server instance outside of project directory. But you have to setup all those upload paths and directory system to be used as bucket.
This problem I am facing with is happening because of capistrano. Every time I run cap production deploy command on my server, the capistrano deployment tool syncs every file with git repo. And the files added by end-users are not stored under my git repos of course, so capistrano overwriting the empty public folder from my repo to the server. Adding the path to :linked_dirs variable under deploy.rb solved my problem.
Another approach could be using a directory which is somewhere else than your project root path (such as /home/files) to store all your files. By doing this you will be seperating your files from project and also prevent capistrano's overwriting problem.
Hope this information will be useful for someone or future me :) ..
When you deploy with capistrano, a new deploy(folder) is created from the repository.
Any files not in the repository are not carried over.
If you want to persist files in public, you need to create a directory in your server first and then create a symlink with capistrano inside public to that folder.
Then have your carrierwave uploads saved to that location.
During each deployment cap will symlink to that directory and your files will be there
I am totally new to rails deployment. After googling, I still find it hard to understand how to deploy rails apps.
So, my questions are:
After setting up the VPS with all rails dependencies, where do I store my codebase? The root directory of the VPS or some specific locations e.g. www/ or public/?
Should I upload the whole rails app folder or just part of it? I have paperclip in my rails app, and paperclip creates a system/ directory in the public/ folder, so should I upload system/?
In Capistrano 3, there is a repo_url field, I know they support file://, https://, ssh://, or svn+ssh://, but most of the articles about capistrano put github repositories into that. However, I do not have such a github repo. What should I input then?
Thank you for your attention.
Answers to the specific questions raised:
After setting up the VPS with all rails dependencies, where do I store
my codebase? The root directory of the VPS or some specific locations
e.g. www/ or public/?
It will be deployed to the folder pointed by :deploy_to parameter. If not specified, :deploy_to defaults to /var/www/#{fetch(:application) See: https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano/blob/05f63f5f333bb261f2a4c4497174361c48143252/lib/capistrano/defaults.rb#L3
Should I upload the whole rails app folder or just part of it? I have
paperclip in my rails app, and paperclip creates a system/ directory
in the public/ folder, so should I upload system/?
Paperclip system folder is specific to the environment; each environment (development, production,...) will have its own system folder which will store the files uploaded on that specific environment. This folder should not be part of the code being deployed.
The recommended way of handing such folders is the keep them in a shared folder on the server, and create symlinks in the current version of the code so that the same folder is used for storing/retrieving attachments. See Section 3. Update custom links section in http://robmclarty.com/blog/how-to-deploy-a-rails-4-app-with-git-and-capistrano for more details about this.
As mentioned there, the same applies to config/database.yml file, and any other file containing environment specific configurations.
In Capistrano 3, there is a repo_url field, I know they support
file://, https://, ssh://, or svn+ssh://, but most of the articles
about capistrano put github repositories into that. However, I do not
have such a github repo. What should I input then?
Depends on where the code you are deploying is stored. If it is in a local folder, use the file::// format to specify where the files are located.
You can set up your own private git server, then in deploy.rb you can put something like
set :repo_url, 'ssh://user#server_ip/path/to/your_git_repo.git'
When you commit your changes to the git repo, you do not have to upload the app to the server. Capistrano will upload the app for you when you deploy.
where do i put my code base? This is determined by what you put in deploy.rb e.g
set :deploy_to, '/path/to/my_codebase'
Whether to upload the /system directory will depend on whether you want the paperclip images on your version control. If not you can add the directory to gitignore. Here is a tutorial on how to deploy on ubuntu 14.04 passenger and NGINX. if you are not using Passenger and Nginx you can skip to how to configure capistrano and make adjustments depending on your setup.
EDIT
You need to install git on your development machine and set up a git server on your VPS as explained on the link above, add your remote server to your local machine using
git remote add origin <server>
where 'server' is the url to your git repo in the VPS e.g.
ssh://VPS_user#VPS_ip/path/to/your_git_repo.git
Now when you commit and push your changes to the server, capistrano will deploy the latest version on your git server.
Here is a link with a guide on how to get started with git
I just deployed my first Ruby on Rails app on a VPS at Digital Ocean.
To get started quickly, I did this by simply dragging my Rails directory tree (and its containing files) onto the server via (S)FTP.
I know this isn't the best solution in the long run. So how can I link my app on the server to my git repository at GitHub?
Ideally, when I work on my app locally, and then git commit and git push to my git repository, my app on the VPS will also get updated automatically.
How can this be achieved or what is the best strategy to achieve this?
Since I am building this app just by myself, I can probably keep things simple and stick to a single master branch, rather than having multiple branches.
Thanks for any help.
If I were you, I'd do the pulling and updating on the remote manually. Sorry, but this is not only best practice, but will also force you to learn something useful about system administration and don't require you to be dependent on one host, but can switch service provider and setup as easy it is to make a git-clone somewhere else.
So my workflow would be:
Client:
# Do some changes, commit and add a nice message
$ git commit myfiles
# Push to remote once I'm happy.
$ git push
# SSH to server, and continue from there.
$ ssh username#server
Server:
# Enter project directory
$ cd /var/www/myproject
# Pull code
$ git pull
Done. Or perhaps finish by refreshing server container (uWSGI, fcgi, gunicorn, what have you...)
Reading other similar answers, they hint to looking at the following resource using Capistrano:
Capistrano documentation at GitHub
You should spend a little time now setting up deploys with some automation. Since you are using rails, you should try Capistrano Gem
Capistrano will help you deploy and maintain your application with just a few simple commands. The Readme will show you how to get started, but in general, you will add the Gem by adding this to your Gemfile:
gem 'capistrano', '~> 3.2.0'
then run bundle install to install Capistrano into your bundle. If you are not already using bundler, you should start.
then run bundle exec cap install to setup your local repo for Capistrano.
Basically now you have a nice structure for deployment scripts as part of your repo. You will have to write some deploy scripts now, or modify the examples.
Once done, Capistrano will help you deploy new code (once committed and pushed to your remote repo) and restart the services.
It depends on whatever service you are using to publish your app. Depending on the provider, they may or may not provide rails service. For example, a site like Heroku, where you can actually host for free up until certain restrictions is accessible via github and you can do exactly what you're saying and just push up and publish.
If you can put your repo on your server, you can set up post-receive hooks to pull your branch into your web app directory.
To do so you would create a bare repo on your server, add it as a remote on your development machine, and then (on your server) create the file /my/app.git/hooks/post-receive and add these lines:
#!/bin/bash
#CONFIG
LIVE="/home/saintsjd/www"
read oldrev newrev refname
if [ $refname = "refs/heads/master" ]; then
echo "===== DEPLOYING TO LIVE SITE ====="
unset GIT_DIR
cd $LIVE
git pull origin master
echo "===== DONE ====="
fi
Code from Automated Deployment of PHP Applications using git, by Jon Saints.
Note that it would be possible to do something like this without putting the repo on your server if you use Github's webhooks (https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/hooks/).
However, I would highly recommend using Capistrano (https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano), which can deploy your application code and help you with a lot of administrative tasks (like restarting the server, etc.).
If you want to stick relatively close to git, you might also check out the git-deploy gem.
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 have started developing a new Rails app on my server using RVM, Rails 3, & Ruby v1.9.2. I am using Git as my code repository. It's a simple app and I don't want to use an extra server. I just want to deploy my app directly from the same server I am developing on.
I've installed Phusion Passenger w/ Apache to serve my app, but have realized that I can't do that pointing to my development directory as my RAILS_ENV is set to "development". (I found I got file permission errors on the asset pipeline and other issues when I attempted to set RAILS_ENV to "production" and serve the app)
What's the simplest/easiest way to deploy the app? Can I simply:
1) Create a separate user to run rails production (Rails in dev currently runs as me on my Ubuntu server)
2) Clone my repo into a separate dir and configure Apache accordingly
3) Seed my database with the data needed for production (not much data needed here)
4) What else?
I've looked briefly at Capistrano, but it seems like overkill for this simple app. I only need to be able to provide a simple web interface for some data entry. Seems like git push should be sufficient, but I haven't done this before so maybe I'm wrong? Also, if I git push how do I ensure file permissions in the "production" directories are all set properly, particularly for any new files that get created in the originating app directory structure?
Thanks for any ideas.
No- you do not need Capistrano for the above; at this stage I feel it will only serve to confuse you further.
I'd suggest you first save your repo to a private Github or free BitBucket account. What you should do is keep one folder for 'development'.
Remember that Passenger is 'just' a module working with Apache. So what you need to do is setup a virtual host under apache and direct that to another folder on your system. For this example, consider:
~/rails/myapp_development/ and ~/rails/myapp_production/
Passenger always runs the app in production, so that should not be an issue. You can do bundle --without=production in your development setup to ignore any gems listed in the Gemfile under the production namespace, i.e. say you've got the mysql adaptor specified, you can ignore this and have Rails only rely on the SQlite gem.
You can now simply develop in the development folder, commit, push to BitBucket. Deploying will be as simply going into the production folder and doing a git pull and touch tmp/restart.txt.