Capistrano::Cookbook

A collection of Capistrano 3 Compatible tasks to make deploying Rails and Sinatra based applications easier.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'capistrano-cookbook', require: false, group: :development

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install capistrano-cookbook

Usage

Including Tasks

To include all tasks from the gem, add the following to your Capfile:

require 'capistrano/cookbook'

Otherwise you can include tasks individually:

require 'capistrano/cookbook/check_revision'
require 'capistrano/cookbook/compile_assets_locally'
require 'capistrano/cookbook/create_database'
require 'capistrano/cookbook/logs'
require 'capistrano/cookbook/monit'
require 'capistrano/cookbook/nginx'
require 'capistrano/cookbook/restart'
require 'capistrano/cookbook/run_tests'
require 'capistrano/cookbook/setup_config'

The Tasks

Check Revision

Checks that the remote branch the selected stage deploys from, matches the current local version, if it doesn't the deploy will be halted with an error.

Add the following to deploy.rb

before :deploy, 'deploy:check_revision'

Compile Assets Locally

Compiles local assets and then rsyncs them to the production server. Avoids the need for a javascript runtime on the target machine and saves a significant amount of time when deploying to multiple web frontends.

Add the following to deploy.rb

 after 'deploy:symlink:shared', 'deploy:compile_assets_locally'

Create Database

Currently only works with Postgresql on configurations where your web server and db server are the same machine, e.g. single box deployments. This task will:

• Check to see if a remote database.yml exists in APP_PATH/shared/config, if not attempt to copy one from APP_PATH/shared/config
• If a new database.yml is created, it will include a username and database name based on the application name and a random password
• Download the remote database.yml
• Create the Postgres user specified in database.yml if it doesn't already exist
• Create the Database specified in database.yml if it doesn't already exist
• Grant the user all permissions on that database

Run using:

cap STAGE database:create

Logs

Allows remote log files (anything in APP_PATH/shared/log) to be tailed locally with Capistrano rather than SSHing in.

To tail the log file APP_PATH/shared/log/production.log on the production stage:

cap production 'logs:tail[production]'

To tail the log file APP_PATH/shared/log/unicorn.log

cap production 'logs:tail[unicorn]'

Monit

Provides convenience tasks for restarting the Monit service.

Available actions are start, stop and restart.

Usage:

cap STAGE monit:start
cap STAGE monit:stop
cap STAGE monit:restart

Nginx

Provides convenience tasks for interacting with Nginx using its init.d script as well as an additional task to remove the default virtualhost from /etc/nginx/sites-enabled

Available actions are start, stop, restart, reload, remove_default_vhost.

reload will reload the nginx virtualhosts without restarting the server.

Usage:

cap STAGE nginx:start
cap STAGE nginx:stop
cap STAGE nginx:restart
cap STAGE nginx:remove_default_vhost

Restart

Provides Commands for interacting with the Unicorn app server via an init.d script.

Usage:

cap STAGE deploy:start
cap STAGE deploy:stop
cap STAGE deploy:force-stop
cap STAGE deploy:restart
cap STAGE deploy:upgrade

Run Tests

Allows a test suite to be automatically run with rspec, if the tests pass the deploy will continue, if they fail, the deploy will halt and the test output will be displayed.

Usage:

Define the tests to be run in deploy.rb

set(:tests, ['spec'])

and add a hook in deploy.rb to run them automatically:

before "deploy", "deploy:run_tests"

Setup Config

The deploy:setup_config tasks provides a simple way to automate the generation of server specific configuration files and the setting up of any required symlinks outside of the applications normal directory structure.

If no values are provided in deploy.rb to override the defaults then this task includes opinionated defaults to setup a server for deployment as explained in the book Reliably Deploying Rails Applications and this tutorial.

Each of the config_files will be created in APP_PATH/shared.config.

The task looks in the following locations for a template file with a corresponding name with a .erb extension:

• config/deploy/STAGE/FILENAME.erb
• config/deploy/shared/FILENAME.erb
• templates/FILENAME.erb directory of this gem (github link)

For any config files included in the source part of an entry in the symlinks array, a symlink will be created to the corresponding link location on the target machine.

Finally any config files included in executable_config_files will be marked as executable.

This task will also automatically invoke the following tasks:

• nginx:remove_default_vhost
• nginx:reload
• monit:restart

To ensure configuration file changes are picked up correctly.

The defaults are:

Config Files:

set(
  :config_files,
  %w(
  nginx.conf
  database.example.yml
  log_rotation
  monit
  unicorn.rb
  unicorn_init.sh
))

Symlinks:

set(
  :symlinks,
  [
    {
      source: "nginx.conf",
      link: "/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/{{full_app_name}}"
    },
    {
      source: "unicorn_init.sh",
      link: "/etc/init.d/unicorn_{{full_app_name}}"
    },
    {
      source: "log_rotation",
     link: "/etc/logrotate.d/{{full_app_name}}"
    },
    {
      source: "monit",
      link: "/etc/monit/conf.d/{{full_app_name}}.conf"
    }
  ]
)

Executable Config Files:

set(
  :executable_config_files,
  w(
    unicorn_init.sh
  )
)

Tips

nginx

It has disabled SSL3 because on security reason.

There is also fix for Weak Diffie-Hellman and the Logjam Attack https://weakdh.org/ in the file: lib/capistrano/cookbook/templates/nginx.conf.erb

It requires to generate for the rails app in the shared/config directory the file dhparams.pem:

$ openssl dhparam -out dhparams.pem 2048

Contributing

1. Fork it ( http://github.com/talkingquickly/capistrano-cookbook/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request