We’ve just released a new version of the Brightbox deployment gem. The gem has supported bundler for a long time, but now calls to rake tasks use bundler too (if the app is bundler enabled of course). This solves the problem some people were having where the right gems weren’t available during rake execution, or rake itself complained about a rake version mismatch.
Today I’m pleased to announce a new revision of the Brightbox Deployment Gem, version 2.3.6. This release fixes some of the issues reported to us by our users, along with a few extra features.
The documentation on the wiki has been updated with the new fixes and features. If you have any tips or find any errors just let us know.
NEW FEATURES
Just as you can currently define gems your application relies on and have them automatically installed onto your servers, you can now do the same with apt packages. Define them in your deploy.rb and they’ll be installed before installing your required rubygems, which means you can use it to install apt packages that gems depend on. As an example, the nokogiri gem depends on a couple of apt packages.
depend :remote, :apt, "libxml2-dev"
depend :remote, :apt, "libxslt1-dev"
depend :remote, :gem, "nokogiri", ">= 0"
Support for Intermediate SSL Certificates in Apache has been added, meaning you no longer need to manually edit the Apache config files directly. Just add one line to your deploy.rb and the gem now takes care of updating the Apache config for you. An example SSL configuration:
set :ssl_certificate, "my_cert.pem"
set :ssl_key, "my_cert.key"
set :ssl_intermediate, "intermediate.crt"
See the wiki page for Adding SSL Support to Apache for more information.
A common issue we’ve seen with is setting the deploy password. If you put it in deploy.rb, then it inevitably ends up in your source control repository, which is a bad idea. A workaround we’ve suggested in the past is to have a deploy.local.rb file, which isn’t tracked by source control, and load that from within your deploy.rb file. This allows you to have the password (or any other sensitive settings) defined, but kept outside your source control.
As part of this release, the gem now has official support for a deploy.local.rb file. If it exists, the gem will load it in for you.
For more information see the Advanced Gem Settings page on the wiki.
If you’ve made manual changes to your webserver (apache or nginx) configuration, then you don’t want an accidental deploy:setup to overwrite your configs. Up until now you just had to avoid running the command, but now there’s a setting to disable it for you.
set :generate_webserver_config, false
FIXES AND ENHANCEMENTS
I’m pleased to announce that we have just pushed a new revision to the Brightbox gem up to Rubyforge.
Version 2.3 of the gem fixes some issues reported to us by our users. A quick summary of the changes from the release notes:
db:check:config rake task. This task was introduced to help with a common config mistake, but just resulted in a different mistake becoming common.rake gems:install. Running this as sudo was causing some permissions errors caused by initialising the Rails stack as root.deploy:check command now works as expected.The change in the way we handle gem dependencies was the reasoning behind making this a minor version release. Previously we simply called the inbuilt Rails 2.2 gem install task. However we found some issues where customers with fresh deployments when running this command as root would result in files being created that could not then be removed during subsequent deployments. We took the decision to use the inbuilt capistrano dependencies to handle the installation of remote gems (examples are available inside the deploy.rb that the brightbox command automatically generates for you).
Update 24/2/2009: We’ve just pushed a new version, 2.3.2 that changes slightly how the gem dependencies work. You now specify a dependency with an alternate source in your deploy.rb like this:
depend :remote, :gem, "tmm1-amqp", ">=0.6.0", :source => "http://gems.github.com"
We’re proud to announce the beta version of our new Brightbox deployment gem. It is available from the Brightbox gem testing repository at http://gems.brightbox.net/testing. You can add this repository to your list by following these instructions.
This gem is a complete rewrite, to take advantage of the latest features of Capistrano and Rails. The Gem works with the current version of Capistrano (2.3) and supports the deployment of Rails 2.x applications.
FEATURES
You can deploy a Rails application onto the Brightbox system with a single command (deploy:initial). We’ve tried to reduce the amount of work required to get an application working. You can follow our simplified initial deployment guide on our wiki
The Brightbox gem is designed to allow you to quickly deploy an application to your new Brightbox. We’ve created sensible defaults for many of the Brightbox command options, and trimmed as much of the fat as we can from the deployment process. But because the gem generates Capistrano files you can tailor this starting point to your exact needs using the full power of Capistrano.
The gem uses the new ‘:none’ scm option in Capistrano that simply zips up the current directory and deploys it on the server. No more messing around with version control security until you’re ready. Just deploy and go.
The standard ‘mysql’ command allows you to put the database, username and password in a file called ‘.my.cnf’ in the ‘rails’ user home directory on the server. The mysql command will then read that file and logon to the database directly. If your application is short of a ‘production’ section in its config/database.yml then the recipes will take the contents of ‘.my.cnf’ and create a production section dynamically.
Rails now has rake commands for creating databases and installing required gems. Where these are available the recipes will use them automatically. For Rails 2.0 users we’ve created a simple ‘stop gap’ rake task that you can use to specify your required gems.
Once the gem is released all new brightboxes will come with the server gem preinstalled. For older boxes you will need to install the server tools manually. Log into your brightbox and run:
sudo gem install brightbox-server-tools -y --no-ri --no-rdoc
The gem asks the operating system to monitor the size of the application logs and rotate them when they get too big or too old. No longer should a neglected log file bring your server to its knees.
Mongrel tend to be dirty when it falls over and leaves PID files lying around to trap the unwary. The new gem cleans up dirty PID files before it restarts.
We’ve simplified the recipes so that, wherever possible, they augment the existing Capistrano deployment commands we all know and love rather than replacing them. That way your deployments gain the benefits of Capistrano improvements as well as improvements in the Brightbox gem. Free software at its best.
We’d like as many Brightbox customers to use the new gem and let us know what they think of it so that we can hone it to perfection. Please give it a go and then pop along to our Brightbox Beta discussion group (http://groups.google.com/group/brightbox-beta) and let us know any feedback or problems.