Using “git push” to deploy Ruby applications to your own server

http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2014/05/12/git-push-ruby-applications-dokku-server-bigv

by technicalfault • 12 years ago

45 22 12 years ago

blog.bytemark.co.uk

sytse• 12 years ago

Very interesting, as GitLab B.V. CEO I'm very much looking forward to part 2 :-)

elij• 12 years ago

Deployments using source control probably aren't wise for most cases -- the index, for the most part, is always growing.

ithkuil2• 12 years ago

Honestly curious: has it ever been a practical problem to you or somebody you know?

regularfry4• 12 years ago

It has for me. Doing deploys direct from source control implies you're doing other things in production you shouldn't be. Like a `bundle install`, or `rake assets:precompile`. Those are both slow and error-prone, neither of which is what you want when you're pushing a bug-fix out.

twistedpair• 12 years ago

Have you ever been unable to reach GitHub during a denial of service attack? They're supposedly rare, but I've been committing during three of them in the last year. Simply, they're not dependable and if you deployment mechanism needs to be dependable then you're adding a rather weak link to the chain.

Obviously you could host/mirror git locally for more robustness, but it will be yet another system you depend on. It is for this reason that every enterprise I've worked at used a solution where a tar ball of the code to be deployed was composed, archived, and then pushed out to ensure it was available for all nodes and that old versions were available for rollbacks.

As a simple example of the above, my TeamCity server builds all commits, then pushes successful war files to S3, then contacts all the server nodes that fetch their deployment code from S3, which has 11 9's durability.

regularfry4• 12 years ago

This is true, but it is awfully simple for getting a site stood up quickly in the first place.

vog• 12 years ago

What about simply putting a "deploy" script into your main source directory? Executing

    ./deploy

is even less work than "git push" into a special remote repository/branch.

This "deploy" script would execute RSync and whatever needed to update the destination machine, without any server-side magic behind the scenes. It could also execute "git push" so you don't have to remember to push before deployment.

klauserc• 12 years ago

IMO the neat thing about a "git push" deployment is that you are deploying a particular commit.

The build server could annotate the build with the commit's hash, making that deployment reproducible.

If you just have a local ./deploy script, a dev might deploy changes that never make it into version control.

(Even if ./deploy forces the working copy to be clean and the index to be empty, the dev could still "git reset --hard" afterwards and the version that has been deployed is lot)

justizin• 12 years ago

or howabout a Capfile and use capistrano?

it's abused for many purposes, but its' job is managing versioned deployments which can be rolled back.

you want this as early as possible, don't shun learning a tool for a couple hours for two years because you don't think you need its' power yet, start getting to know it so you're ready when you do.

scott_karana• 12 years ago

Something I've found useful is separating the .git directory and the actual working folder.

(Eg, the /home/app/foo.git repository's working directory is in /var/www/foo)

All you need is to move the .git directory, and then make a .git file with these contents in your working directory:

  gitdir: /home/foo/foo.git

binocarlos• 12 years ago

Dokku is awesome (as is Docker which it builds on). The guy that wrote it (Jeff Lindsay) has been working on Flynn for the past 6 months - https://flynn.io/ - think of Flynn like a 'multi host dokku'

csixty4• 12 years ago

I love Dokku for my Node apps. Still trying to find a good setup for WordPress installs that need to be able to upload media.

donw2• 12 years ago

I'm curious how this would handle rolling restarts (maybe a randomized delay before deploying?) or rollbacks on failed deployments...

NicoJuicy• 12 years ago

If anyone is interested, i just added the MS alternative (it's the engine for Azure, but it's opensource and you can use it yourselve)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7755914

dkhenry• 12 years ago

I have used git-deploy in many cases and it works great for any language/framework combo

damian2000• 12 years ago

https://github.com/git-deploy/git-deploy

Interesting ... it says one of its main functions is the ease of reverting / backing out of an install.

richardwhiuk• 12 years ago

>>> # Not currently on any branch.
>>> nothing to commit (working directory clean)
> This means we’re on the version of Dokku currently suggested for use with Ubuntu 12.04 by its author.

No, it just means your on a detached head. Instead of git status, try:

  git tag --points-at HEAD

Using “git push” to deploy Ruby applications to your own server

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