0 2009-05-19T14:55:20-04:00 28 true <p>The joys of <a href='http://www.capify.org/'>Capistrano</a> have long eluded me. I was well aware of the easy life of instant deploys that it promised, but getting it up and running on my <a href='http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=lefthip'>WebFaction</a> account proved an insurmountable task that always saw me giving up in frustration, I didn’t even <em>try</em> getting things going with <a href='http://rubyhitsquad.com/Vlad_the_Deployer.html'>Vlad</a>. Every time I created a <a href='http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=lefthip'>WebFaction</a> account I bravely attempted to get Capistrano running again, and every time I failed and gave up. Maybe the problem had to do with me not being willing to fork out the cash for a Github account – I was trying to deploy instead from my local <a href='https://github.com/'>Github</a> repo. Or maybe it had to do with Capistrano’s vague/non-existent error messages; I had a feeling that the software was vague due to the fact that it was created and intended for an elite group of intelligent professionals, not troglodytic hackers like myself. </p> <p>The first time I created a Hosting Rails account I found getting things going with Git and Capistrano were incredibly easy. And the benefits of Capistrano were <em>immediately</em> discernible. Pushing changes were suddenly a few words and a return key away instead of an exercise in annoyance. The writeup I followed to get Capistrano working on <a href='http://www.hostingrails.com/'>Hosting Rails</a> was based on the idea of deploying from a Git repo on the <a href='http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=lefthip'>WebFaction</a> account itself. </p> <p>It occurred to me that this could be the key to finally getting Capistrano and Git working for me on <a href='http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=lefthip'>WebFaction</a>&#8230;. 24 hours later, and after endless curses, hair pulling, fists banged on tables and whatnot, I finally got the darned thing playing nice, pretty much.</p> <p>This is the solution that finally worked for me, based on a combination of resources:</p> <ul> <li><a href='http://blog.localkinegrinds.com/2008/09/16/using-capistrano-to-deploy-to-webfaction/'>Ryan Kanno’s article on Deploying With Capistrano To Webfaction</a></li> <li><a hre'http://www.hostingrails.com/wiki/46/Capistrano-2x&#8212;-Deploying-Your-Rails-Application-on-HostingRailscom'>The Hosting Rails article Deploying With Git and Capistrano</a></li> <li><a href='http://www.hostingrails.com/wiki/59/How-to-Deploy-Rails-Using-Git-with-Capistrano-on-Mongrel-with-HostingRails'>More Hosting Rails Info On Capistrano And Git</a></li> <li><a href='http://forum.webfaction.com/viewtopic.php?pid=9718'>The Webfaction Article On Doing Your Own Ruby Install</a></li> <li><a href='https://help.webfaction.com/index.php?<em>m=knowledgebase&amp;</em>a=pdfexport&amp;kbarticleid=169'>This PDF on a personal Git Install on Webfaction</a></li> </ul> <h2>Preliminaries</h2> <ul> <li>Create your <a href='http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=lefthip'>WebFaction</a> account, Rails app and database, add your <a href='http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=lefthip'>WebFaction</a> production database to config/database.yml.</li> <li>Create a <a href='https://help.webfaction.com/89'>personal Webfaction Ruby install</a>. At the point where you install the mysql gem using the instructions in this article, you will encounter an error. Run this instead: <code>gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/bin/mysql_config</code> </li> </ul> <h2 id="step_1_install_git">Step 1 - Get Git Going</h2> <ul> <li>Go to the <a href='http://git-scm.com/'>Git</a> site and copy a link to the latest release, then log in to your <a href='http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=lefthip'>WebFaction</a> account using SSH and get it (adjust your actions according to the release): <code>wget http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.5.6.tar.bz2</code></li> <li>Untar Git: <code>tar -xvjf git-1.6.5.6.tar.bz2</code></li> <li>Change into the Git directory: <code>cd git-1.6.5.6</code></li> <li>Configure it: <code>./configure --prefix=$HOME</code></li> <li>Make it: <code>make &amp;&amp; make install</code></li> <li>Now test to make sure everything worked by calling the Git version: <code>git version</code></li> <li>You’ll need to edit .bashprofile and .bashhrc in your Webfaction home folder now to make sure that the Git command line works: <pre><code># .bash_profile # Get the aliases and functions if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then . ~/.bashrc fi # User specific environment and startup programs PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin GIT=/home/me/git-1.6.5.6/ export PATH export PATH=$GIT:/home/me/ruby1.8/bin/:/home/me/ruby1.8/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/ bin/:$PATH </code><pre></li> <li>Create a zip archive of your app on your local machine.</li> <li>Go to your home folder, then create a place for your repository on the server: <pre><code>cd mkdir git</code></pre</li> <li>Back on your local machine, copy up your app: <code>scp /path/to/myapp.zip username@domain:~/git/</code></li> <li>Back on the server, unzip the application, then initialize a Git repository: <pre><code>cd git unzip myapp.zip cd myapp git init git add . git commit -a -m "Initial commit."</code></pre></li> </ul> <ul> <li>Back on your local machine, clone the Git repo, then Capify it: <pre><code>git clone me@domain:/home/me/git/myapp myapp cd /path/to/myapp capify .</code></pre></li> </ul> <p>Everything worked this far? Great! On to the next step: the Capistrano recipe&#8230;</p> <h2 id="the_capistrano_recipe">Step 2. The Capistrano Recipe (myapp/config/deploy.rb)</h2> <script src="http://gist.github.com/171309.js"></script> <h2>Step 3. Prepare Your App For Capistrano</h2> <p>Log into your Webfaction account and create a directory called webapps-releases, then empty your webapp folder, save for the autostart, and relink : <pre><code>cd ~/webapps/myapp mv autostart.cgi ~/ rm -rf * mv ~/autostart.cgi . ln -s ~/webapps-releases/myapp/shared/log ~/webapps/myapp/log</code></pre> <p>Now you want to edit the last line of your autostart: <code>os.system('/home/me/ruby1.8/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/bin/mongrel_rails start -c /home/me/webapps-releases/myapp/current -d -e production -P /home/me/webapps/myapp/log/mongrel.pid -p MY PORT NUMBER')</code> <h2 id="final_steps">Step 4. Final Steps</h2> <ul> <li>Save the recipe and add it to your Git repo. <pre><code>git add . git commit -a -m "Capified." git push</code></pre></li> <li>Now your are ready to begin your deployment: <pre><code>cap deploy:setup cap deploy:update</code></pre></li> </ul> <h2>Future Deployments</h2> <p>If you’ve got this far without any problems, future deployments might be as easy as comitting your changes and deploying:</p> <pre><code>git add . git commit -m 'my latest commit' git push origin master cap deploy</code></pre> <h2>Notes</h2> <p>I have had problems with a few gems, namely <a href='http://wiki.github.com/why/hpricot'>Hpricot</a> and <a href='http://redcloth.org/'>RedCloth</a>, perhaps because they include non-Ruby files in C and Java etc). I found that the only way to get around these problems was to NOT INCLUDE THEM in the config.rb gem dependencies in my application. Just install them on your <a href='http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=lefthip'>WebFaction</a> via gem install hpricot, gem install RedCloth. I think these gems are also causing problems with the standard deploy procedure&#8230;. If your app is not working after running cap deploy, you can try running</p> <code>cap:deploy:restart</code> <p>or</p> <pre><code>cap deploy:stop cap:deploy:start</code></pre> <h2>Solving Restart Problems After Cap Deploy</h2> <p>I have been having problems and found that the procedure that works for me is to modify the capistrano restart procedure to this:</p> <script src="http://gist.github.com/179918.js"></script> <p>Capistrano’s error messages are vague/non-existent as far as I can tell. I finally troubleshot my problems by modifying the capistrano gem itself to print out various parts of its process - eg the revision, the results, the command it was issuing, etc&#8230;. you might try doing this, if you’re having problems. </p> <h2>Capistrano Migrations</h2> <p>I have had trouble with Capistrano’s cap deploy:migrate feature, and solved it like this:</p> <script src="http://gist.github.com/179914.js"></script> <h2>javan-whenever</h2> <p>I also had problem getting javan-whenever to update via Capistrano, and after much wrangling I finally started reading through Capistrano’s endless logging and discovered that sh was simply not finding whenever, so this worked for me:</p> <script src="http://gist.github.com/179912.js"></script> 2009-12-13T12:43:19-05:00