Often times I’m impressed by simple tools that do a great job. Gitploy is one such tool, a very small deployment DSL created with git in mind that is dead-simple to use. It is only about 125 lines of ruby code that you can read and understand in few minutes.

If you need a more complex deployment tool that supports different SCMs and has various predefined tasks for managing deploys go check out Capistrano. Or if you need something in between you can check out git-deploy which uses git hooks.

How do you deploy with Gitploy?

This is my Gitploy script for deploying popravi.mk to staging and production stages:

require 'gitploy/script'

configure do |c|
  stage :staging do
    c.path = '/home/deployer/www/staging.popravi.mk'
    c.host = 'staging.popravi.mk'
    c.user = 'deployer'
    c.local_branch = 'staging' # default is current branch
    c.remote_branch = 'master' # default is master
  end

  stage :production do
    c.path = '/home/deployer/www/popravi.mk'
    c.host = 'popravi.mk'
    c.user = 'deployer'
  end
end

setup do
  remote do
    run "mkdir -p #{config.path}"
    run "cd #{config.path} && git init"
    run "git config --bool receive.denyNonFastForwards false"
    run "git config receive.denyCurrentBranch ignore"
  end
end

deploy do
  push!
  remote do
    run "cd #{config.path}"
    run "git reset --hard"
    run "ruby -v"
    run "bundle install"
    run "bundle exec rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production"
    run "bundle exec rake assets:precompile"
    run "touch tmp/restart.txt"
  end
end

In the script, we define a path , user and host for the different stages that we want to deploy to: staging and production. We can specify local_branch and remote_branch for each stage. And we define setup step that will create target folder and initialize git repo and deploy step that will do the deploy. Both define which actions will be run on production and staging servers using SSH connection.

To install the gem run:

gem install gitploy

To setup the target folder and init repo for production stage run:

gitploy production setup

To deploy the app to production run:

gitploy production

For staging stage you’ll need to do the same. And, there is also a manual step in between to configure the database.yml and other config files that is only done once.

How do you automate your deploys and what tools do you use?