Introducing DeploYML

When Rails 3.0.0.beta.1 was first released, there was some confusion about how to deploy a Rails3 app with this new Bundler thing. A few blog posts were written with some monkey patches for injecting into Capistrano, which enable early Bundler support. Unfortunately, Bundler was still very new and none of the deployment tools had official support yet.

Around the same time, I needed to deploy a Rails3 app and I did not want to deal with the heavy weight of Capistrano; nor did I want to rely on a monkey patch from a blog post. Of course the first thing I did was look at the alternatives, which were Vlad The Deployer or write a bash script that used rsync / ssh / git. After trying to run the vlad rake tasks, I hit some weird bugs with how it was calling git or thin. Being on a dead-line and not wanting to wait on Capistrano or Vlad, I thought it should be easy to create a simple deployment utility with git and ssh.

DeploYML

Introducing DeploYML, a simple deployment solution for Ruby / Rails projects that uses a single YAML file, Git and ssh.

Configuring DeploYML requires at least two things:

# config/deploy.yml
source: git@github.com:user/project.git
dest: deploy@www.example.com/var/www/site

Then one can deploy the project using the deployml command:

$ deployml deploy

After making some changes, one can re-deploy the project:

$ deployml redeploy

Configuration

Of course, one will want to specify more information, such as what server to run the project under:

source: git@github.com:user/project.git
dest: deploy@www.example.com/var/www/site
server: apache

Or what options to run the server with:

source: git@github.com:user/project.git
dest: deploy@www.example.com/var/www/site
server:
  name: thin
  options:
    servers: 4
    deamonize: true
    socket: /var/run/thin.sock
    rackup: true

Or more importantly, what Framework or ORM the project uses:

source: git@github.com:user/project.git
dest: deploy@www.example.com/var/www/site
framework: rails3
orm: datamapper
server: apache

One can even specify multiple-environments:

# config/deploy.yml
source: git@github.com:user/project.git
framework: rails3
orm: datamapper

# config/deploy/staging.yml
dest: ssh://deploy@www.example.com/srv/staging
server:
  name: thin
  options:
    config: /etc/thin/staging.yml
    socket: /tmp/thin.staging.sock

# config/deploy/production.yml
dest: ssh://deploy@www.example.com/srv/project
server:
  name: thin
  options:
    config: /etc/thin/example.yml
    socket: /tmp/thin.example.sock

Administration

DeploYML does more than just deploying, it also allows interacting with the deployment server and deployed project.

Need to quickly ssh into the server as the deploy user?

$ deployml ssh

Need to quickly execute a command remotely, within the directory of the deployed project?

$ deployml exec 'ps aux'

Need to execute a rake task remotely?

$ deployml rake db:autoupgrade

Interested?

Install it today:

$ gem install deployml

Note: I originally started DeploYML before Imploy was released, and just now got around to making a release. If you feel Capistrano is too heavy, I encourage you to also checkout Imploy for deploying Rails3 apps.