Building and deploying from a remote server with Capistrano

Question

I'm new to Capistrano and struggling a little to get started. A brief description of what I need to do:

• git pull the latest code from our git repo, on a central build server. This build server's environment matches the deployment environment exactly. I need the code to be built here. I don't want to deploy a binary that was built on a Mac laptop, for example.
• compile the binary on this machine.
• deploy it from this machine to all the target machines.
• There is a shared user we can all SSH into on the build machine to do the builds.
• The build machine is behind a gateway machine, not directly accessible.
• All of the deployment target machines also have this shared user and are also behind the gateway.
• The deployed binary is a single executable, and there is an init script on the target machines. After deploying the binary and changing the symlink to it, restart the service via the init script.
• Everyone has appropriate SSH keys and agent forwarding for all necessary tasks.

So in principle it seems rather simple, but Capistrano seems opinionated and a bit magical. As a result I'm not sure how to accomplish all of this. It seems like it wants to check out my code and copy it to the remote machines, for example without building it first.

I think I need to ignore all of Capistrano's default smarts and just make it run some shell commands on the appropriate servers. In pseudo-code:

• ssh buildmachine via gateway "cd repo && git pull && make"
• ssh targetmachine(s) via gateway "scp buildmachine:repo/binary .; <mv && symlink>; service foo restart"

Am I even using the right tool for the job? It seems a lot like a round peg in a square hole.

Can someone explain to me what the contents of the Capistrano configuration files should be, and what cap commands I'd run to accomplish this?

BTW, I've searched around and looked at questions like deploying with capistrano with remote git repo but without git running on production server and From manual pull on server to Capistrano

Answer 1

The question is rather old, but you never know when someone steps onto it in need of information...

First and formost, consider that Capistrano might just not be the right tool for the job you want to do.

That said, it is not impossible to accomplish what you expect. While in projects that deploy large amount of files and modify them (like css/js minify, js builds etc.) I would avoid it, in your case, you can consider runing a "deployment repository" and configure it in capistrano as the source. Your process would look like this :

• run the local build with whatever tools you need
• upload resulting binary to a deployment repository
• run capistrano that will connect to application servers, fetch fresh binary from repository, perform any server side tasks required and symlink to "current"

As a side effect you end up with full history of deployed binaries