Nancy Blenkhorn

Vlad the Deployer makes it easy to deploy your Rails projects, however the documentation didn’t make it easy to cobble together the bits I needed. After Googling and reading I have successfully set up Vlad for my project so I’m documenting my process for anyone else that might need a hand.

Here’s my setup:

• Git ( self-hosted Gitosis repository )
• Rails 2.3.5
• Vlad 2.0.2
• Vlad-Git 2.1.0
• Apache 2.2
• Phusion Passenger 2.2.11
• Debian Lenny ( Linode server )
• Snow Leopard ( development machine )

Install Vlad

The Vlad gem supports Subversion so you also need to install the gem/plugin for Git support.

sudo gem install vlad
sudo gem install vlad-git

Import vlad’s Rake tasks. You can add this to your main Rakefile or create lib/tasks/vlad.rake.

begin
  require ‘vlad’
  Vlad.load :app => :passenger, :scm => :git
rescue LoadError
  # do nothing
end

rake vlad:setup

You only need to run this task once – to create the :deploy_to directory on the server. It should contain the following directory structure:

scm/
releases/
shared/log/
shared/pids/
shared/system/

config/deploy.rb

Because I don’t like to keep passwords in version control I set up a shared/config directory and put my database.yml there. I added a Rake task to my deploy.rb that copies the contents of my shared directory into the current release.

set :user, “deploy”
set :application, “myApp”
set :repository, “gitosis@myserver.com:#{application}.git”
set :deploy_to, “/path/to/#{application}”
set :domain, “#{user}@myserver.com”
set :web_command, “sudo apache2ctl”

namespace :vlad do
   remote_task :copy_config_files, :roles => :app do
      run “cp #{shared_path}/config/* #{current_path}/config/”
   end
end

namespace :vlad do
   task :deploy => %w[
     vlad:update
     vlad:copy_config_files
     vlad:migrate
     vlad:start
     vlad:cleanup
   ]
end

vlad tasks

• rake vlad:setup – Used to set up the initial directory structure on the remote server.
• rake vlad:update – Vlad removes everything from scm/repo and replaces it with a fresh clone of the Git repository and points the current symlink in the deploy directory to the new release.
• rake vlad:migrate – This task runs rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production for the current deployment on the server.
• rake vlad:start – This task restarts the application by touching tmp/restart.txt and restarts the web server using apache2ctl.
• rake vlad:cleanup – This task will remove all but the last 5 deployed releases.
• rake vlad:deploy – The Rake task for a full deploy.