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

Apt Package Dependencies

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"

Intermediate SSL Certificates

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.

Deploy.local.rb

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.

Disable (re)generating webserver config

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

• Max Age setting now accepts a number as well as a string
• deploy:initial reloads Apache so the new config is loaded