Deploying Websites with Capistrano

Presented by Andrew Turner at the 2014 Front Porch Front End Web Developer Conference in Dallas, Texas.

@galenandrew lanyrd.com/sdchkf

Aq1 - The conversion optimization agency

Common Deployment Methods

  • Server-side Editing
  • FTP Upload
  • File Syncing
  • Live Remote Repositories
  • Post-receive Hooks/Webhooks
  • Third Party Deployment Services
  • Continuous Integration

Deployment Chalenges

  • Often a manual process
  • High risk of error (easy to break things)
  • Potential downtime during upload/sync
  • No record of log of deployments
  • Typically not well documented or easily distributable
  • Difficult to manage for multiple environments
  • Updates are difficult to reverse

…especially when a deployment crashes a live site!

Capistrano is a remote server Automation and Deployment tool that provides versioned releases and day rollbacks

How does it work?

  • Deployment scripts are stored in your project
  • Executed locally from the command line (Ruby Gem)
  • Connects directly to your server via SSH
  • Checks out code from remote repository to your server
  • Performs automated tasks/commands on server (or locally)
  • Keeps deployment log and versioned releases
  • Provides easy ability to rollback releases

Loca. => Server => Repository

  • deploy command is issued on local
  • local connects to server via SSH
  • server updates project code from repository
  • server issues a new release and logs deployment

Installation/Setup

  1. Instal Capistrano
    • gem install capistrano
  2. Initialize Capistrano in your project
    • cap install

Usage

  1. Deploy
    • cap production deploy
  2. Rollbak
    • cap production deploy:rollback

Directory Structiure: local/project

-Capfile
-config
     -deploy
          -production.rb
          -staging.rb
     -deploy.rb

Directory Structure: server

-current
-releases
     -20141007112233
     -20140903223344
     -20140821334455
-repo
-shared
-revisions.log

note: Make sure to point your web host’s document root to current as it is a symlink to the latex release.
For example, in the above current would be a symlink (alias) to 20141007112233

This post is from the Front Porch Conference Series. If you enjoyed it, please check out the others below.