Capistrano & syncing static files to remote location - deployment

As part of a Capistrano deployment I want to sync my CSS, JS and images to a remote location (Amazon S3). However, I'm worried that if the Capistrano deployment fails, this will leave me with updated CSS, JS and images.. but the main application code will still be on the previous release.
I'm wondering if there is a way with Capistrano to only trigger a task if the deployment is marked as complete and current folder is pointing at the newly deployed release folder? This would at least allow me to only update the static files once I know the main source has been updated..
Of course, I would still have the problem of - what if the sync with S3 fails? But I think this way would have the better balance in terms of points of failure.

Capistrano has a bunch of hooks you can use during the deploy.
http://capistranorb.com/documentation/getting-started/flow/
You probably want to use the 'deploy:finished' hook for your use case, for example.
after 'deploy:finished', 'deploy:sync_assets_to_S3'
Then create a cap task to perform your file uploads.

Related

Unreleasing (undeploying) applications in VSTS?

I have a project with N git repos, each representing a static website (N varies). For every git repo there exists a build definition that creates an nginx docker image on Azure Container Registry. These N build definitions are linked to N release defenitions that deploy each image to k8s (also on Azure). Overall, CI/CD works fine and after the releases have succedded for the first time, I see a list of environments, each representing a website that is now online.
What I cannot do though with VSTS CI/CD is to declare how these environments are torn down. In GitLab CI (which I used before), there exists a concept of stopping an environment and although this is just a stage in .gitlab-ci.yaml, running it literally removes an environemnt from the list of the deployed ones.
Stopping an environment can be useful when deleting autodeployable feature branches (aka Review Apps). In my case, I'd like to do this when an already shared static website needs to be removed.
VSTS does not seem to have a concept of unreleasing something that has already been released and I'm wondering what the best workaround could be. I tried these two options so far:
Create N new release definition pipelines, which call kubecetl delete ... for a corresponding static websites. That does make things clear at all, because an environment called k8s prod (website-42) in one pipeline is not the same one as in another one (otherwise, I could see whether web → cloud or web × cloud was called last):
Define a new environment called production (delete) in the same release defenition and trigger it manually.
In this case 'deploy' sits a bit closer to 'undeploy', but its hard to figure out what was last (in the example above, you can kind of guess that re-releasing my k8s resources happened after I deleted them – you need to look at the time on the cards, which is a pretty poor indication).
What else could work for deleting / undeploying released applications?
VSTS has not the feature "stop environment" (auto delete the deployed things on the environment) in release management. But you can achieve the same thing in VSTS YAML build.
So except the two workarounds you shared, you can also stop the environment by VSTS YAML build (similar as the mechanism in GitLab).
For YAML CI build, you just need to commit the file end with .vsts-ci.yml. And in the .vsts-ci.yml file, you can specify with the tasks to delete the deployed app.

Deploy build files from continuous integration

I am working on a project with multiple people, a website application which requires webpack to be built, uglified, concatenated into a few files e.g. app.min.js, style.min.css etc. - As a result of this, in an effort to prevent merge conflicts we recently added the build folder to .gitignore, under the assumption that we would be able to build during deployment.
When pushing to the Master branch, we automatically "deploy" through Semaphore CI (similar to Travis) which runs composer install, npm install, and finally "npm run build" which triggers the webpack build. This is all built and then tested on the CI side of things, and then Semaphore automatically deploys to Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk where our application is hosted.
The problem with this is, it seems Semaphore doesn't upload the build it's just tested, but rather the Master branch itself which has no built JS or CSS. I'm wondering if there's a way to push these built files to deployment as well, or if running the entire build process AGAIN on Elastic Beanstalk is the only route. It seems unnecessary to have to do that process essentially 3 times, locally, CI, and then deployment. Every time a step like this is needed on EB the actual re-instantiation time gets longer, which I'd like to keep as short as possible.
Obviously if building it a 3rd time on EB is the only way to go about this then I'll have to, just wondering if there are better solutions for this whole workflow.
I haven't worked with Semaphore CI, but you might be able to use an .ebignore file.
If you create one, the cli will use that instead of your .gitignore file.
I find in some deployment situations you want the inverse of your .gitignore (all compiled, no src). It essentially lets you pick the files from your project directory that you want to deploy, in the same way as the .gitignore file.
Edit: I just noticed the documentation on aws is lacking. It only mentions file exclusion, but you can include files too.
Edit 2: I don't think Semaphore supports the use of .ebignore, so right now this solution isn't of any use. :(
I just had a great first experience with https://deploybot.com/. The can deploy directly to elastic beanstalk. It might be interesting or you.

What grunt files to upload to repo vs files to upload when deploying site to production

So, I have a webapp I am creating using the 3 muskateers yeoman, grunt and bower.
My questions are:
What is best practice when it comes to uploading my webapp into a git/mercurial repo? Do I include the entire project? What about directories like 'node_modules' or 'test', etc?
Also, when deploying to live production site: Will my 'dist' folder be what I should be uploading?
With research yielding no results (I could be searching the wrong things?).. I'm a bit new to this process so any feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
You should always commit all of your yeoman, grunt, and bower config files.
There are two schools of thought on committing the output they produce or dependencies they download:
One is, you should upload everything needed for another user to deploy the web app after cloning the repository, without performing any additional operations. The idea is, dependencies may not exist anymore, network connections might be down, etc.
Another is, keep the repository small and don't commit node_modules, etc, since they can be downloaded by the user.
As far as the dist folder goes, yes you'll be uploading it to your server, as it contains all of your minified files. Whether or not you want to commit it to the repository is a separate question. You might let the user build every time, assuming they can get all the dependencies one way or another (from above choice). Or you might want to commit it to tag it with a release version along with your source code.
There's some more discussion on this here: http://addyosmani.com/blog/checking-in-front-end-dependencies/

is there a deploy tool (or set of tools) that supports rollback of a deployment?

I'm learning FluentMigrator. The thing that I like about FM is that it supports the idea of Forward and Back for migrations (aka Up/Down). I'm finding that it's not ideal about this; there are some holes. Still, it's good.
This leads me to wonder if there are any deployment tools (nant, msbuild or other) that support this idea of rolling forward and back. The scenario that I'm using it in is the deployment of a web app with a related database.
Ideally I'd like to set up my deployment so that, should any part of it fail, it will revert to the previous known working configuration. With FM, this is pretty easy to do (but there are rough spots), so that covers the db. How about the files that make up the web app? Do any deploy tools have support for this?
Deploying to a Windows Server. Assume that I can't make any changes to the server.
I don't know of any Microsoft-centric, automated provisioning/deployment tools like Capistrano. Here are some tools I've heard of, but never used:
MSDeploy, for deploying web application.
Microsoft Deployment Services, for managing operating system configuration
Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager
BladeLogic
HP's Operations Center
Up until about three months ago, we did our deployment/provisioning using custom MSBuild scripts. After a server is provisioned, deploys happen automatically using Robocopy to copy files to a share on the application server, updating changed application binaries and markup files. We've never had a need to rollback any of our deployments, but since our scripts are custom, we could write the logic if we needed to.
MSBuild is a terrible deployment/provisioning language. For the past three months, we've been writing all new scripts in, and porting existing ones to, PowerShell. It is wonderful. With version 2, there is support for running commands on remote servers, like SSH. We haven't used that functionality yet, but I'm looking forward to pushing setup scripts to remote server to provision and deploy at the same time.
We have been using Git to do our deploys for the last 6 months.
Here is the whole process:
CI server build the project
CI server checks it in to a local git repository
CI server pushes the changes to the centralised git repository
User creates an empty repository on the live server
User adds the central git repository to the remotes
User pulls the latest version over https (no need to open any ports)
It is a lot to setup in the beginning but once setup it works great. Deploys take seconds as only changed files get copied.
Another great thing about this method is that git keeps history of changes so rolling back is pretty simple. You can also roll back a few revisions and it's done straight on the live server. If something goes wrong reverting is super fast.
Also you can save some time if you use a hosted git service (github) for your central repository.
This is a very brief description but I can give you more info if you want.
Of course! My favorite is Capistrano. This was originally built for Ruby but I've found that it works just as well for other languages.
https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano

How to deploy artifacts of TeamCity to Amazon EC2 Server

We decided to use AMAZON AWS cloud services to host our main application and other tools.
Basically, we have a architecture like that
TESTSERVER: The EC2 instance which our main application is
deployed to. Testers have access to
the application.
SVNSERVER: The EC2 instance hosting our Subversion and
repository.
CISERVER: The EC2 instance that JetBrains TeamCity is installed and
configured.
Right now, I need CISERVER to checkout codes from SVNSERVER, build, if build is successful, unit test it, and after all tests pass, the artifacts of successful build should be deployed to TESTSERVER.
I have completed configuring CISERVER to pull the code, build, test and produce artifacts. But I couldn't manage how to deploy artifacts to TESTSERVER.
Do you have any suggestion or procedure to accomplish this?
Thanks for help.
P.S: I have read this Question and am not satisfied.
Update: There is a deployer plugin for TeamCity which allows to publish artifacts in a number of ways.
Old answer:
Here is a workaround for the issue that TeamCity doesn't have built-in artifacts publishing via FTP:
http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/TW-1558#comment=27-1967
You can
create a configuration which produces build artifacts
create a configuration, which publishes artifacts via FTP
set an artifact dependency in TeamCity from configuration 2 to configuration 1
Use either manual or automatic triggering to run configuration 2 with artifacts produced by configuration 1. This way, your artifacts will be downloaded from build 1 to configuration 2 and published to you FTP host.
Another way is to create an additional build step in TeamCity for configuration 1, which publishes your files via FTP.
Hope this helps,
KIR
What we do for deployment is that the QA people log on to the system and run a script that deploys by pulling from the team city repository whenever they want. They can see in team city (and get an e-mail) if a new build happened, but regardless they just deploy when they want. In terms of how to construct such a script, the team city component involves retrieving the artifact. That is why my answer references getting the artifacts by URL - that is something any reasonable script can do using wget (which has a Windows port as well) or similar tools.
If you want an automated deployment, you can schedule a cron job (or Windows scheduler) to run the script at regular intervals. If nothing changed, it doesn't matter much. I question the wisdom of this given that it may mess up someone testing by restarting the system involved.
The solution of having team city push the changes as they happen is not something that team city does out of the box (as far as I know), but you could roll your own, for example by having something triggered via one of team city's notification methods, such as e-mail. I just question the utility of that. Do you want your system changing at random intervals just because someone happened to check something in? I would think it preferable to actually request the new version.