I'm new to Capistrano and struggling a little to get started. A brief description of what I need to do:
git pull the latest code from our git repo, on a central build server. This build server's environment matches the deployment environment exactly. I need the code to be built here. I don't want to deploy a binary that was built on a Mac laptop, for example.
compile the binary on this machine.
deploy it from this machine to all the target machines.
There is a shared user we can all SSH into on the build machine to do the builds.
The build machine is behind a gateway machine, not directly accessible.
All of the deployment target machines also have this shared user and are also behind the gateway.
The deployed binary is a single executable, and there is an init script on the target machines. After deploying the binary and changing the symlink to it, restart the service via the init script.
Everyone has appropriate SSH keys and agent forwarding for all necessary tasks.
So in principle it seems rather simple, but Capistrano seems opinionated and a bit magical. As a result I'm not sure how to accomplish all of this. It seems like it wants to check out my code and copy it to the remote machines, for example without building it first.
I think I need to ignore all of Capistrano's default smarts and just make it run some shell commands on the appropriate servers. In pseudo-code:
ssh buildmachine via gateway "cd repo && git pull && make"
ssh targetmachine(s) via gateway "scp buildmachine:repo/binary .; <mv && symlink>; service foo restart"
Am I even using the right tool for the job? It seems a lot like a round peg in a square hole.
Can someone explain to me what the contents of the Capistrano configuration files should be, and what cap commands I'd run to accomplish this?
BTW, I've searched around and looked at questions like deploying with capistrano with remote git repo but without git running on production server and From manual pull on server to Capistrano
The question is rather old, but you never know when someone steps onto it in need of information...
First and formost, consider that Capistrano might just not be the right tool for the job you want to do.
That said, it is not impossible to accomplish what you expect. While in projects that deploy large amount of files and modify them (like css/js minify, js builds etc.) I would avoid it, in your case, you can consider runing a "deployment repository" and configure it in capistrano as the source. Your process would look like this :
run the local build with whatever tools you need
upload resulting binary to a deployment repository
run capistrano that will connect to application servers, fetch fresh binary from repository, perform any server side tasks required and symlink to "current"
As a side effect you end up with full history of deployed binaries
Related
I have an ubuntu staging server where I have installed apache, php, mysql, git, composer installed. I have a private git repository setup on the bitbucket, the project is already cloned to the staging server and to my local development machine. The Laravel setup is working perfectly fine on both machine.
What I am currently doing is whenever there is an update to the git repository, I do login to the staging server, pull the latest code from the git repository and do composer install, npm install, bower install.
I want to automate this process via capistrano tool. I checked the tutorials online, but all of them do the clone of repository whenever, I issue a deploy command and creates a fresh installation every time. Can't capistrano helps me to work on the existing folder that is already setup?
The basic premise of Capistrano is the idea that a new installation is created each time, such that there is not much to be done initially in terms of setup. If you'd rather use a different mechanism, a different tool would work better for you! For such cases, you could try to write a script using SSHKit directly (fairly advanced), or write a makefile or some other tool to automate your process.
If you do want to try to make Capistrano work on its terms, look into how linked_dirs and linked_files work in it. They allow you to have some files (e.g. config files, log dirs, etc) which are outside of the deployment directory and as such are shared between deploys.
I need to manage a few servers that run code that is currently being deployed there as a couple of git repositories. I would like to be able to store in the project's repository the parts (if not all) of the playbook that is relevant for the repository. For example, the list of package dependencies, virtualenv requirements, configuration templates. This will also allow those to change in a per branch/commit way. Meaning I can make sure that if I need to deploy a specific branch/commit, playbook that is correct for that commit is being used, if, say, the configuration template being used changed.
It seems like the only solution is to checkout the git repository locally. Is it possible in ansible to tell it to run a remote play book (from the git repository that is being checked out on the server)? I was thinking of having ansible run a ansible using a local connection on the remote host, I haven't tried it to see if this will actually work out.
How do people manage to use ansible for continuous deployment based on git without some mechanisms for running a remote playbook?
Take a look at ansible-pull.
It pulls the repo and executes playbook.
As many apps do, we have a number of config and properties files for our Java applications. We have gone with the approach of keeping these files separate from our codebase (i.e. they are not included in the war files for deployment) but in a separate directory. However, I would still like to track changes to these files in a source control and deploy them using our CI.
I'm looking for strategies on how others have done this. Did you write a script to push the files to the app server(s). Does the script live on the CI server?
Our SCM is Mercurial which we have set up on its own server to use as a central repo. Our CI is Hudson (not Jenkins) set up on its own server and of course our app servers are separate from these as well. All servers are *nix OS.
Consider using configuration management tools like puppet or chef for managing all your application configuration files. Both tools use "manifests" or "receipes" which can placed under revision control and matched to each server deploying the application.
Another option is to consider is to develop an install package for your OS, see the following articles for more details:
http://www.sonatype.com/people/2011/11/bringing-java-and-linux-together-on-the-way-to-continuous-live-deployment/
The advantage of doing it this way is that the install can be configured to generate the correct configuration tailored for the environment it is deployed onto. A more important benefit is that it's simpler to manage and install.
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
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.