Capistrano::SafeDeployTo

A simple Capistrano plugin that:

• ensures the deployment directory exists on the server
• ensures proper deployment directory ownership

With this, your deployment should never fail because you forgot to create a deployment directory for your new app on the server.

Works with Capistrano 3. Does not work with Capistrano 2.

About

You set a Capistrano deployment directory with a deploy_to setting. By default the value of deploy_to is "/var/www/#{app_name}".

Your first deploy will fail if the deploy_to directory does not exist, you're not deploying as root and your deploy user does not have rights to create a deploy directory.

And yes, deployment to default deploy_to directory will most likely fail.

That is easy to fix, right? A quick:

• ssh yourserver
• sudo mkdir -p /var/www/app_name
• sudo chown deploy:deploy /var/www/app_name

Except that is painful, unnecessary and there's no need to manually ssh to the server to deploy apps!

There are other solutions to this problem (Chef, Ansible), but if you'd like to solve it via Capistrano, read on.

Usage

Install with:

gem 'capistrano', '~> 3.2.1'
gem 'capistrano-safe-deploy-to', '~> 1.1.1'

then:

$ bundle install

and then add to Capfile:

require 'capistrano/safe_deploy_to'

And you're done. $ bundle exec cap production deploy should just work! (or at least it won't fail because directories don't exist).

There are no configuration options (thank God!)

How it works

capistrano-safe-deploy-to hooks to before 'deploy:check' task. It:

1. creates s deploy_to directory with sudo mkdir -p <your_deploy_dir>
2. gives proper ownership to deploy dir with sudo chown <deploy_user>:<deploy_user_group> <your_deploy_dir>

It's simple, but you don't have to do or think about it. Let the computers work for you!

More Capistrano automation?

Check out capistrano-plugins github org.

License

MIT