Easy Ruby on Rails Deployment with Capistrano and Passenger

Michael Pardo — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:03:13 +0000

Let’s start off with a few aliases that speed things up. The commands are pretty self explanatory. I’ve got my deployment down to a simple acd command, which will add and commit to svn, then deploy to the server. To add a migration before deployment I use acmd. The following commands go into your ~/.bash_login file (assuming you’re using OS X or Linux).

alias svna='svn add * --force'
alias svnc='svn commit . -m ""'
alias capd='cap deploy'
alias capm='cap deploy:migrate'
alias acd='svna; svnc; capd;'
alias acmd='svna; svnc; capm; capd;'
alias rors='script/server -b localhost'

If you don’t already have capistrano setup, it’s as easy as

1	$ gem install -y capistrano

When I first setup an new rails project I follow these steps

$ rails -d mysql PROJECT_NAME
$ cd PROJECT_NAME
$ capify .
$ svn import PROJECT_PATH SVN_PATH -m 'Initial import'
$ cd ..
$ rm -Rf PROJECT_PATH
$ svn co SVN_PATH
$ mate PROJECT_PATH

This initial setup process will create the rails project, setup Capistrano, add it to svn, and open it in TextMate. You can of course leave that last line out and use any IDE you wish.

Next open the config/deploy.rb file that Capistrano created for you. This is where you will put all your Capistrano instructions:

set :user, "SUDO_USER"
set :password, "SUDO_USER_PASS"
set :domain, "example.com"
server domain, :app, :web
role :db, domain, :primary => true
 
set :application, "example"
set :deploy_to, "/home/example/public_html/#{application}.sandbox.#{domain}/#{application}/"
 
default_run_options[:pty] = true
set :use_sudo, true
set :runner, :user
 
set :repository,  "http://#{domain}/svn/#{application}"
set :scm_username, "SVN_USER"
set :scm_password, "SVN_USER_PASS"
set :checkout, "export"
 
namespace :deploy do
  desc "Restart Application"
  task :restart, :roles => :app do
    run "touch #{current_path}/tmp/restart.txt"
  end
end

Just change all the capitalized tokens to reflect your own settings. Then deploying should be as simple as typing acd in the Terminal. I created a blank file at /tmp/restart.txt and added it to svn so passenger will restart the rails app when you deploy. Also, you may not want to put your sudo password into deploy.rb.

I entountered various struggles in getting everything to work correctly. If you need help with something specific, post it in a comment. I can probably tell you what the problem is.

You can find help for Passenger here: http://www.modrails.com/ and help for Capistrano here: http://www.capify.org/

michael pardo » Ruby

Easy Ruby on Rails Deployment with Capistrano and Passenger