I know this question has probably been asked so many times here, but I didn't really find a good answer. I'm trying to find a simplest solution to do basically just checkout a git project on an ec2 instance, checkout a specific branch and then restart apache server.
I'm not sure if Capistrano is what I need. I'm fine with some shell script or ruby script which basically just invokes commands like 'git clone....', 'git checkout branch...' and 'restart apache server'
Is there a framework which lets me do this so I don't really have to write a script from scratch.
First off, are we talking about "Deployment" or about "just get a codebase and copy to the server"?
In the first case, Deployment is a set of common practices, as following:
"server" as abstractions
keep versions and rollback ability
database migration, rollback and backup functionality
manage background processing
It's actually mean manage the full-stack application, not only "restart httpd" or something else.
Capistrano developed with 37signals contributions and they are using it on many projects. A lot of projects use capistrano or the same tool to do deployments. Look at this again, it's easy to setup and use.
Related
My former web developer setup my site so that it uses Jenkins and GitHub. I understand the very basics of GitHub and even less of Jenkins. But in theory, when I make minor text changes to my website, can't GitHub manage the process of pushing those changes to the server? Or is there some good reason that Jenkins is also involved?
Thank you.
Yes. It's not a must but using both Jenkins and Github will make your life easy. Github and Jenkins are two tools that help you to do different functions.
Github will mainly help you to manage your codebase, resolve conflicts, etc. So it will basically behave as a repository. You can commit your changes and get other's updates and always be up to date. There are tons of other advantages but I'll keep it simple for understanding purpose.
Jenkins is an open-source automation server. In your case, you can automate the product building. For example if you have a test environment or even when you deploy the changes t live, you can do all that with just a click. And you can separately build tests and live environments and With concepts like pipeline, you can even integrate the building with tests, etc.
But if you are talking about your local environment, yes git is enough because you can build the project manually. but in production have git and jenkins both will be a handy option.
Read more on Jenkins
Ok, Using capistrano 3.2 with Rails 4.2.
Put simply I want to have each release on the live server to have an intact git repo with it. I know Cap uses git to clone the files but afik it deletes the .git folder by default. I swear I had this working before on earlier versions of Capistrano but no amount of Docs or Googling is finding the right setting. Or if I had an odd version of Cap
And before I get jumped on with "Version control on live? Never make changes to live, develop on your dev server you idiot!?"
Having an active git repo on live is invaluable if something changes out of your control, or if there is an emergency you have no choice but to monkey patch. Because now you have the change shown up by git and you can commit it, and push it back into your central repo and have it go up stream neatly. Its saved my ass before and means I don't have to copy by hand what I know has fixed the "live" issue.
Anyway, justification over. Anyone know how?
I apologies for the simple question, I think it's unlucky google fu which has left me without an answer from searching for this. Searching "Capistrano leave git on live" or other such terms are swamped with using git to deploy.
Cheer in advance.
This would be non-trivial. Capistrano uses git archive piped through tar to create the release folder. Hypothetically, you could override the task which does this, but you would probably spend more effort than it would be worth. I would highly recommend that you look at just creating a workflow where you commit a hotfix and push again. We use a prod branch at which the production deploy points, thus you could commit the change to the prod branch and cap production deploy, then merge your change back down to your development branch.
If you do choose to try and override this, look at the Capistrano source for the git tasks. It uses the Git Strategy class, so you would need to subclass and override it, then override the task to use your class. Capistrano is basically just a subclass of Rake, so look for documentation around overriding a Rake task, e.g. Overriding rails' default rake tasks.
Good luck!
I've just finished setting up my Jenkins server but there seems to be one glaring problem that I can't find an answer to.
Shouldn't the Jenkins environment be an exact clone of the production environment to make it effective? None of the tutorials i've read mention this fact at all. So how do people deal with this fact? especially if they are using a single Jenkins instance for multiple projects that may be running on different infrastructure?
I can imagine puppet or chef might help here but wouldn't you be constantly re-provisioning the jenkins server for different projects. sounds pretty dangerous to me.
The best solution to me seems to be to not run the test on the Jenkins server itself but to spin up a clone of the production environment and run the tests on that? But I can't find a single solitary tutorial on how this could be done on EC2 for example.
Sorry if this is a bit of a rambling question. So how does everyone else deal with ensuring an exact replica of the production environment for Jenkins to run tests on? This includes database migrations as well now that I think about it.
Thanks.
UPDATE:
A few of the answers given seem to concern compiled languages like java or objective-c. In those situations I can see the logic of having the tests be plaform agnostic. I should have been more specific and mentioned that I use Jenkins for LAMP stack testing. So in that situation the infrastructure is as much a component that needs testing as anything else.Seeing as having PHP5.3 on one machine is enough to break a project that requires PHP5.4 for example.
There is another approach you can consider.
With Vagrant, you can create completely virtual environment that simulates your production. This is especially useful, when you want to test many environments (production, single node env, different OS, different DB) but you don't have enough "bare metal" machines.
You define proper vagrant environment. Next in Jenkins test item you setup proper machines, and execute tests on created vagrant environment.
Jenkins also supports a Master/Slave system (see here for details).
The jenkins slave itself does not need much configuration and could run on your production system replica, as it also does not need much configuration it should not influence your production clone significantly.
Your master would then just delegate the jobs (like your acceptance tests) to your slave. In that way you could also setup different production environments (like different OS, different DBs etc.) by just setting up a Jenkins slave for every configuration you need.
You are probably using Jenkins to check the quality of your code, compile it, run unit tests, package it, deploy it and maybe run some integration tests.
Given the nature of all those tasks, it is probably best that your Jenkins environment is NOT like your production environment. For example, you don't want your production environment to have your compiler installed (for many reasons, security to name one).
So, Jenkins is a development environment, and the fact that is doesn't exactly match your production environment should not be a concern to you.
However, I understand that perhaps you want to deploy your packages to a production-like or even production-clone environment to run some specific tests or tasks of your software lifecycle, but in my opinion that issue is beyond jenkins and concerns only the "deployment" phase of your lifecycle (ie. it's not a "Jenkins" issue, but an infrastructure issue that you should think about with a more general approach, and then simply tell jenkins where to deploy).
This question is just arising out of curiosity. Everyone now a days use jenkins for build and deployment automation, but still many of these people shy away from using the jenkins for Production deployment.
Considering Jenkins is such a nice and easy tool, I don't really understand why we don't see more of Jenkins in production deployment. Is it because of some security reasons? If yes, what these security reasons might be?
Or any other reason which exists that make some people to have 2 different tools for automation, one for dev and lower environment and another for higher environment like production.
System Admins running Production environments don't want to be obsoleted/automated out of their job by "Dev tools"
I might be bit late here but I would like to share an automated process that will allow you to handle the entire production Deployment using a single YAML file.
For more information
https://github.com/frostyaxe/Blaze-Tracker
I'm working on my first rails app and am struggling trying to find an efficient and clean solution for doing automated checkouts and deployments.
So far I've looked at both CruiseControl.rb (having been familiar with CruiseControl.NET) and Capistrano. Unfortunately, unless I'm missing something, each one of them only does about half of what I want (with each one doing a different half).
For what I've seen so far:
CruiseControl
Strengths
Automated builds on repository checkouts upon commit
Also runs unit/functional tests and reports back
Weaknesses
No built-in deployment mechanisms (best I can find so far is writing your own bash scripts)
Capistrano
Strengths
Built for deployments
Weaknesses
Has to be kicked off via a command (i.e. doesn't do automated checkouts upon commit)
I've found ways that I can string the two together -- i.e. have CruiseControl ping the repository for changes, do a checkout upon commit, run the tests, etc. and then make a call to Capistrano when finished to do the deployment (even though Capistrano is also going to do a repository checkout).
Basically, when all is said and done, I'd like to have three projects set up:
Dev: Checkout/Deployment is entirely no touch. When someone commits a file, something checks it out, runs the tests, deploys the changes, and reports back
Stage: Checkout/Deployment requires a button click
Prod: Button click does either a tagged check out or moves the files from stage
I have this working with a combination of CruiseControl.NET and MSBuild in the .NET world, and it was fairly straightforward. I would guess this is also a common pattern in the ruby deployment world, but I could easily be mistaken.
I would give Hudson a try (free and open source). I started off using CruiseControl but got sick of having to relearn the XML configuration every time I needed to change a setting or add a project. Then I started using Hudson and never looked back. Hudson is more or less completely configurable over the web. It was initially a continuous integration tool for Java but has plugins for other development stack such as .NET and Ruby on Rails. There's a Rake plugin. If that doesn't work, you can configure it to execute any arbitrary command line after running your Rake builds/tests.
I should also add it's extremely easy to get Hudson going:
java -jar hudson.war
Or you can drop the war in any servlet container.
I would use two system to build and deploy anyway. At least two reasons: you should be able to run it separately and you should have two config files one for deploy and one for build. But you can easily glue the two systems together.
Just create a simple capistrano task, that tests and reports back to you. You can use the "run" command to do anything you want.
If you don't want any command line tool there was webistrano 2 years ago.
To could use something like http://github.com/benschwarz/gitnotify/tree/master to trigger the build deploy if you use git as repository.
At least for development automated deployments, check out the hook scripts available in git:
http://git-scm.com/docs/githooks
I think you'll want to focus on the post-receive hook script, since this runs after a push to a remote server.
Also worth checking out Mislav's git-deploy on github. Makes managing deployments pretty clean.
http://github.com/mislav/git-deploy