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Deploying Your Application to Slingshot using Capistrano

What is Capistrano?

"Capistrano is a standalone utility that can also integrate nicely with Rails. You simply provide Capistrano with a deployment “recipe” that describes your various servers and their roles, and voila! You magically have single-command deployment. It even allows you to roll a bad version out of production and revert back to the previous release." -- Capistrano: Automating Application Deployment

What do you need to use Capistrano?

• The Capistrano gem installed on your local development environment
• A Rails Application under subversion control
• A Customized Slingshot Hosting deploy.rb file (see below)

I'm ready, how do I deploy?

First, install capistrano and capistrano-ize your application, according to the instructions on Capistrano: Automating Application Deployment. See the section on "Installing Capistrano"

In a nutshell, you'll do:

sudo gem install capistrano

gem install capistrano

You may be prompted to install dependencies (net-ssh, net-sftp, and needle) if it asks, just say yes.

Capistrano-ize your application:

cap -A /path/to/application

Now, depending on how your server is configured, you can either deploy using externally managed fastCGIs with our custom scripts for restarting, or using mongrel_cluster.

How do I setup lighttpd with externally managed fastCGIs?

We are no longer using lighttpd setups in favor of mongrel/mongrel_cluster with Apache mod_proxy_balancer. If you still want to know, go here.

How do I setup Apache 2.1+ with mod_proxy_balancer and mongrel_cluster?

All you need to do is download our custom apache2_2_mongrel_deploy.rb file and replace it with your current deploy.rb in your config directory.

wget http://www.slingshothosting.com/files/apache2_2_mongrel_deploy.rb /path/to/application/config/deploy.rb

curl -O http://www.slingshothosting.com/files/apache2_2_mongrel_deploy.rb /path/to/application/config/deploy.rb

Open up the file in your favorite editor. We like textmate:

mate /path/to/application/config/deploy.rb

Change the following lines to suit your needs:

set :application, "your_application_name"
set :user, "your_username" # leave blank to be prompted
set :password, "your_password" # leave blank to be prompted
set :svn_username, "your_username" 
role :web, "yourserver.slingshothosting.com"  # could also be your FQDN
role :app, "yourserver.slingshothosting.com"
role :db,  "yourserver.slingshothosting.com", :primary => true
set :server_name, "yourserver.com"

You can alter other settings, but be aware that we prefer convention over configuration, and as it stands, Slingshot Hosting servers are ready for your application.

How do I start using capistrano?

You're ready to setup your directories:

rake remote:setup

rake remote:exec ACTION="setup"

Now, check in any changes you've made, be sure to add the files we've added:

svn add config/deploy.rb deploy
svn commit --message "added Slingshot hosting capistrano to my app"

You're ready to deploy:

rake remote:cold_deploy

A cold deploy sets up your server from scratch ( a cold start from nothing). Once you've done this, you can continue developing and deploy to your server using:

rake remote:deploy

rake remote:deploy_with_migrations

If you're like us, you don't like waiting for a full checkout/export of your entire application every time you deploy, so if you're making small updates, use:

rake remote:update_code

And optionally, if you change application code (require application server restarts)

rake remote:restart

If you encounter any errors in your application, you can always roll back to a previous version. Simply execute:

rake rollback

Let us know if you have any questions, problems, or suggestions!