Deploy a Ruby application with Capistrano, rvm & bundler ⎋
The wastelands of “sysadminia”
If you want to get your code out there, you - as a developer - need to match your most fierce adversary: the “sysadmin”. It can’t be done from the comfort of your shiny Mac development environment, you need to go out in the wastelands of “sysadminia” where the fans howls 24/7 and sysadmins roam with their mighty htop, tmux and pkill. There will be no clever plugins, no IDEs, no snippets, just plain text. You will need an ally.
There are 2 weapons in particular which make all the conventional sysadmin tools look cheap in comparison: Chef and Puppet. You should pick one and make it your horse: it will make a life and death difference in the wastelands. Both of them are fine choices, go with whatever makes you most comfortable, but know this: Chef comes with a knife. I don’t use it myself, true men fight with their bare hands, but just in case you’re a stabby proc -> person, it will suit you.
So let’s assume that you’ve chosen Chef, your chances are already looking good. Preparation is everything, so let’s pick up some gear first.
Githubia
The best place for finding the most awesome gear is Githubia. It’s a world of magic with unicorns and eternal queues. Some say that when developers die, they all hope to end up in this land of magic.
I will pick the RVM & bootstrap cookbooks.
Once you have those 2 cookbooks, this is a sample role which configures a server with rvm, latest Ruby 1.9.2 and sets up a new user under which we’ll deploy our Ruby app.
name "ruby_apps"
description "Ruby Apps"
run_list "recipe[build-essential]",
"recipe[git]",
"recipe[ssh]",
"recipe[sudo]",
"recipe[bootstrap]",
"recipe[bootstrap::users]",
"recipe[rvm]",
"recipe[rvm::users]",
"recipe[bootstrap::ruby_apps]"
default_attributes(
:ssh => {
:password_authentication => "no",
:permit_root_login => "no"
},
:sudo => {
:groups => ["admin"],
:users => ["ubuntu"] # the default sudo user on Ubuntu-based EC2 AMIs
},
:bootstrap=> {
:users => {
:gerhard => {
:admin => true,
:deploy => true,
:keys => [
"my-sha-is-longer-than-your-sha",
]
}
}
},
:rvm_rubies => ["1.9.2"],
:ruby_apps => ["rubyapp"]
)
The other cookbooks are mostly taken from the gchef repository, everything else comes from opscode cookbooks.
Let’s make sysadmins drool over our deploys
Once you cook your server with the above role, it will be all set up for deploying. Before we go to the deployment files, pick some good hints from this abridged ~/.ssh/config file:
# to prevent SSH connections timing out. This will poll the server every 60".
ServerAliveInterval 60
ServerAliveCountMax 3
# use my local SSH key to authenticate on the remote hosts (when tunelling)
ForwardAgent yes
Host ec2-rubyapp
Hostname ec2-50-19-201-63.compute-1.amazonaws.com # deploying to the cloud FTW!
User gerhard # it will default to your username if omitted
Here’s a deploy.rb, taken from a production app.
# makes the output nice and colourful
# gem 'capistrano_colors'
require "capistrano_colors"
default_run_options[:pty] = true # Must be set for the password prompt from git to work
ssh_options[:forward_agent] = true
set :application, "rubyapp"
set :repository, "git@github.com:gerhard/#{application}.git"
set :user, application
set :use_sudo, false
set :default_shell, "/bin/bash" # required for rvm scripts to work properly
server "ec2-rubyapp", :app, :web
set :scm, :git
set :branch, "master"
set :deploy_via, :remote_cache
set :deploy_to, "/home/#{application}"
set :keep_releases, 10
set :myself, `whoami`.chomp # if more users have the same user on the server,
# with deploy privileges and ssh keys set up properly, they can deploy!
set :rvm_path, "/usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm"
def close_sessions
sessions.values.each { |session| session.close }
sessions.clear
end
def with_user(new_user, &block)
initial_user = user
set :user, new_user
close_sessions
yield
set :user, initial_user
close_sessions
end
And now for the Capfile where all the magic happens. It assumes that you are using foreman for managing your app processes. If you’re not using it already, drop everything and get it set up straight away: David - the creator himself - introduces Foreman.
load 'deploy' if respond_to?(:namespace) # cap2 differentiator
load 'config/deploy' # remove this line to skip loading any of the default tasks
namespace :deploy do
task :stop, :roles => :app, :except => { :no_release => true } do
with_user myself do
run [
"sudo [ -f /etc/init/#{application}.conf ]",
"[ $(sudo status #{application} | grep -c running) -eq 1 ]",
"sudo stop #{application} || exit 0"
].join(" && ")
end
end
task :generate_upstart, :roles => :app, :except => { :no_release => true } do
with_user myself do
run [
"source ~/.profile",
"cd #{current_release}",
"bundle exec foreman export upstart /tmp -u #{application} -a #{application}",
"sudo [ -f /etc/init/#{application}.conf ] || exit 0",
"sudo rm /etc/init/#{application}*.conf",
].join(" && ")
run "sudo mv /tmp/#{application}*.conf /etc/init/"
end
end
task :start, :roles => :app, :except => { :no_release => true } do
with_user myself do
run [
"sudo [ -f /etc/init/#{application}.conf ]",
"[ $(sudo status #{application} | grep -c running) -eq 0 ]",
"sudo start #{application}"
].join(" && ")
end
end
task :restart, :roles => :app, :except => { :no_release => true } do
stop
generate_upstart
start
end
end
task :ensure_permissions do
run "chmod g-w #{deploy_to}"
end
after 'deploy:setup', :ensure_permissions
after 'deploy:update', :ensure_permissions
task :bundle do
run [
"source #{rvm_path} && cd #{release_path} &&",
"bundle install",
"--gemfile #{release_path}/Gemfile",
"--path #{shared_path}/bundle",
"--deployment --quiet",
"--without development test"
].join(" ")
end
after 'deploy:finalize_update', :bundle
after 'deploy:update', 'deploy:cleanup'
I’m making use of upstart (running on Ubuntu, aren’t you?!?), bundler & rvm, everything just works. Chef takes care of all the burden related to getting system-wide rvm to play nicely with user shell profiles. I’m using bash on the server and defining it explicitly in Capistrano. Trying to make the default Capistrano sh shell option work properly with rvm is guaranteed to make your blood boil, I prefer to play with unicorns and rainbows instead.
It might not be the most elegant solution, but it works. Everything is nice and straightforward, tasks are pretty self explanatory and can be tweaked to your own taste. Go on then, try some painless deploys, the feeling is awesome!
UPDATE
I came across Tom’s gem after getting this deploy strategy in place, his tomafro-deploy gem is definitely worth checking out.
