Using capistrano for static sites

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 | Comments

I’ve been using capistrano for rails deployment for a while. I thought I’d see how useful it was for managing some static sites – it turned out to be really useful. Here’s how to do it:

First, create the project in subversion and check it out. I really like the idea of everything being in source control. My normal process for updating a site is:

check out site files
make changes
review locally
check them in
publish updated site

Capistrano helps with the last step – to publish your updated site, you simply use:

$ cap deploy:update

In this example, my subversion repository is at dev.work.com/svn the site is mysite.com and the server is located at bighost.com

$ svn mkdir http://dev.work.com/svn/mysite
$ svn co http://dev.work.com/svn/mysite
$ cd mysite
$ mkdir -p config public public/images public/stylesheets public/javascripts
$ capify .
[add] writing './Capfile'
[add] writing './config/deploy.rb'
[done] capified!

If you already have content for the site, copy it into the ./public directory tree. Otherwise, create the content in place.

Edit config/deploy.rb as follows

set :application, "mysite"
set :repository,  "http://dev.work.com/svn/mysite"
set :deploy_via, :copy

set :deploy_to, "/home/denis/#{application}"

role :app, "bighost.com"
role :web, "bighost.com"
role :db,  "bighost.com", :primary => true

Check all of these into subversion and create the server-side directories with:

$ svn add *
$ svn ci
$ cap deploy:setup

Note that in this example, the web site is served from /home/denis/mysite/current/public. Here’s the apache config file (to be installed in /etc/apache2/sites-available) to make that work:

<VirtualHost *>
  ServerAdmin denis@hennessynet.com
  ServerName mysite.com
  ServerAlias www. mysite.com
  DocumentRoot /home/denis/mysite/current/public
  <Directory /home/denis/mysite/current/public>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    allow from all
  </Directory>

  ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error. mysite.log
  CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access. mysite.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Denis Hennessy

Using capistrano for static sites