Deploy with capistrano

These configurations depends on capistrano. It deploys to a staging and a production environment. It uses:

1. nginx with support for unicorn and passenger (both totally configurable).
   1. Bonus 1: one of the most secure nginx configuration regarding SSL, being capable of grade A at Qualys SSL Labs test
   2. Bonus 2: support for automatically starting a websocket server when using the gem websocket-rails and passenger.
2. unicornherder, monitored by supervisord (runing its web interface at port 9001), to manage the unicorn instances
3. delayed_job to run background processing, if the use_delayed_job flag is set in deploy.rb.
4. monit (running its web interface at port 2812) to manage the database (mysql or postgres, configurable), nginx and to watch for the resource usage of unicorn instances and all the previous services. Check each file under recipes/templates/monit for the resource limit of the services.
5. whenever and backup gems to backup the database, user uploaded files, and logs. If the flag backup is set on deploy.rb. The script will do daily backups of the database and keep one week of dailies, one month of weeklies, and a year of monthlies. The uploaded files will be kept synced through RSync. Please, take a look at the backup model templates and customize them to match your needs if the options in deploy.rb aren't enough, the backup gem is too complete and full of tools for us to parameterize everything in there. You can find its docs here.
6. logrotate to rotate the logs, either by size or time, if rotate_log is set in deploy.rb. Size AND time conditions are yet not supported, because logrotate 3.81 is still not present in most Linux distributions.
7. installs paperclip-optimizer (a gem to losslessly compress every image uploaded through paperclip) dependencies if the flag is set in deploy.rb.

Recomendations

Before deploy to production, use the following gems:

1. brakeman: To mitigate the security problems

2. rack-mini-profiler: To mitigate database performance issues

3. simplecov: To mitigate missing tests

4. exception_notification: To warning about live errors on production

Configuring the VPS

After create the VPS, with a ssh key exclusive for the projet (see below), you must follow this steps.

Create a ssh key

cd ~/.ssh
ssh-keygen -t rsa -C '<[email protected]>'

Set the locale

If you have some locale error like:

 locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

Run:

echo "pt_BR.UTF-8 UTF-8" >> /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local && dpkg-reconfigure locales

Update the server

apt-get -y update && apt-get -y upgrade

Create staging environment

Create the staging environment. Just run the command above and make the necessary modifications for staging environment:

cp config/environments/production.rb config/environments/staging.rb

Add the deploy user

On the server:

adduser deploy --ingroup sudo

Get the password here

On your machine run:

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa_<project>.pub deploy@<server>

Permit ssh to gitlab

Logged in as deploy user, run:

ssh [email protected]

Change capistrano configs

Add to your Gemfile (updating the versions):

gem 'unicorn', '~> 4.7.0'

group :development do
  gem 'capistrano', '~> 2.15.5', require: false
end

Run bundle install then run capify ..

Uncomment the line load 'deploy/assets' on the Capfile. Then copy all files of this project to config dir, except the Capfile, that should be copied to the rails root path.

Remember to choose a database (mysql or postgresql) and set wether you use SSL or not in the deploy.rb file and all the other project specific settings in there.

Project dependencies

Ajust the recipe project_dependencies for your project needs

Install

Before install, you must check if your new ssh-key is added:

ssh-add -L

If you don't see your key, you can add typing the following command:

ssh-add <path_to_key>

Then, you are able to install:

cap <environment> deploy:install

Capistrano setup

cap <environment> deploy:setup

Set production configs

• secret_key_base at config/secrets.yml

First deploy

cap <environment> deploy:cold

If need to send mail

sudo apt-get install sendmail

Finally

After that, just run cap <environment> deploy.