Deploying Drupal with Capistrano
Posted by Giovanni Intini | Filed under Capistrano, Drupal, PHP, Ruby
Mikamai, the company I work for, has just released Montalbano.tv, the companion site to one of the most successful TV shows in Italy.
I was the technical director of this Drupal based project, and while I was happy we chose Drupal, because it allowed us to deliver all the features they needed on time, I almost panicked when they told us the production setup would have two servers, both with database and web serving duties.
The database replication was standard MySql master-master setup, but I had to develop a strategy to keep the two code-bases on the two servers synchronized.
Being a Ruby programmer at heart, I selected the only tool that never fails me in circumstances like the one we had: Capistrano.
Unfortunately, while Capistrano is all easy to use with Rails, I had to write a custom Drupal-tailored Capfile.
Here it is, in its entirety, in case you ever need to deploy Drupal with cap (now I always deploy Drupal with cap, since I have the recipe ready
):
load 'deploy' if respond_to?(:namespace) # cap2 differentiator # Standard configuration set :user, "username" set :password, "password" set :application, "application.name" # I like to deploy the code in /var/apps # and then link it to the webserver directory set :deploy_to, "/var/apps/#{application}" # SCM Stuff configure to taste, just remember the repository # here I used github as main repository set :repository, "git@github.com:username/project.git" set :scm, :git set :branch, "master" set :repository_cache, "git_master" set :deploy_via, :remote_cache set :scm_verbose, true # Two servers, double fun # You really don't need app, web and db here, # but I used all of them just to be sure. # Usually only web is ok. role :app, "first.server.address.com" role :app, "second.server.address.com", :primary => true role :web, "first.server.address.com" role :web, "second.server.address.com", :primary => true role :db, "first.server.address.com" role :db, "second.server.address.com", :primary => true after 'deploy:setup', 'drupal:setup' # Here we setup the shared files directory after 'deploy:symlink', 'drupal:symlink' # After symlinking the code we symlink the shared dirs # Before restarting the webserver we fix all the # permissions and then symlink it to production before 'deploy:restart', 'mikamai:permissions:fix', 'mikamai:symlink:application' namespace :drupal do # shared directories task :setup, :except => { :no_release => true } do sudo "mkdir -p #{shared_path}/files" sudo "chown -R #{user}:#{user} #{deploy_to}" end # symlink shared directories task :symlink, :except => { :no_release => true } do sudo "ln -s #{shared_path}/files #{latest_release}" end end namespace :deploy do # adjusted finalize_update, removed non rails stuff task :finalize_update, :except => { :no_release => true } do sudo "chmod -R g+w #{latest_release}" if fetch(:group_writable, true) end task :restart do # nothing to do here since we're on mod-php end end namespace :mikamai do # symlinking to production namespace :symlink do task :application, :except => { :no_release => true } do sudo "rm -rf /var/www/montalbano" sudo "ln -s #{latest_release} /var/www/montalbano" end end # change ownership namespace :permissions do task :fix, :except => { :no_release => true } do sudo "chown -R www-data:www-data #{latest_release}" end end end
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