Deploying symfony Applications with Capistrano

Capistrano is an open source tool for running scripts on multiple servers. Its primary use is for easily deploying applications. While it was built specifically for deploying Rails apps, it’s pretty simple to customize it to deploy other types of applications. We’ve been working on creating a deployment “recipe” to work with symfony applications to make our job a lot easier.

Prerequisites

• Symfony 1.4+ OR Symfony2
• Must have SSH access to the server you are deploying to.
• Must have Ruby and RubyGems installed on your machine (not required for deployment server)

Installing Capifony

Through RubyGems.org

sudo gem install capifony

Through GitHub

git clone git://github.com/everzet/capifony.git
cd capifony
gem build capifony.gemspec
sudo gem install capifony-{version}.gem

Setup your project to use Capifony

CD to your project directory & run:

capifony .

This will create a Capfile in your project root & a deploy.rb config file in your config (for symfony) or app/config (for Symfony2) directory.

Fill up your config/deploy.rb with your server connection data.

Server Setup

Now, you can start the deployment process! To get your server setup with the directory structure that Capistrano expects, CD to your local project directory and run:

cap deploy:setup

Running this command locally will create the following directory structure on your server:

`-- /var/www/demo.everzet.com
  |-- current → /var/www/demo.everzet.com/releases/20100512131539
  |-- releases
    |-- 20100512131539
    |-- 20100509150741
    `-- 20100509145325
  `-- shared
    |-- log
    |-- config
      `-- databases.yml
    `-- web
      `-- uploads

The folders in the releases directory will be the actual deployed code, timestamped. Capistrano symlinks your log & web/uploads directories from your app to the directories in the shared folder so that it doesn’t get erased when you deploy a new version of your code.

Deployment

To deploy your application, simply run:

cap deploy

To specify the username/password to use over SSH, add the following configuration to your config/deploy.rb file:

set :user, 'username'
set :password, 'password'

To configure database on production environment, run:

cap symfony:configure:database

To deploy your application for the first time, you can run:

cap deploy:cold

This will deploy your application, configures databases.yml (will ask you about DSN, user, pass), create the db, models, forms, filters, and run all of your migrations.

Now, whenever you need to deploy a new version of your code, just run:

cap deploy

Databases

If you need to dump remote database & download this dump to local backups/ folder, run:

cap database:dump:remote

If you need to dump local database & put this dump to local backups/ folder, run:

cap database:dump:local

If you need to dump remote database & populate this dump on local machine, run:

cap database:move:to_local

If you need to dump local database & populate this dump on remote server, run:

cap database:move:to_remote

Shared folders

If you need to download some shared folders from remote server, run:

cap shared:{databases OR log OR uploads]:to_local

If you need to upload some shared folders to remote server, run:

cap shared:{databases OR log OR uploads]:to_remote

Host Permissions

If you are not allowed sudo ability on your host you can add the following configuration to your config/deploy.rb file:

set :use_sudo, false

If your host complains about the entire project being group-writable you can add the following configuration to your config/deploy.rb file:

set :group_writable, false

Git Specific Options

If you are using Git submoduleis you'll want to add the following to your config/deploy.rb file or the submodule files won't be brought down with your project:

set :git_enable_submodules, 1

Other tasks

If you need to deploy and run your migrations you can call:

cap deploy:migrations

We’ve also added a custom task to run your test suite on the production server. You can invoke this by calling:

cap deploy:tests:all

This will deploy the application, rebuild the test database, then run all of the tests.

Also, you have command to run your custom symfony tasks:

cap symfony

If you want to see all of the Capistrano tasks available, you can run:

cap -T

We’ve been using this setup for a little while now, and it’s saved us a ton of time when we need to push changes for a site to the production server.

Contributors

• everzet (owner): http://github.com/everzet
• Arlo (contributor): http://github.com/arlo
• Xavier Gorse (contributor): http://github.com/xgorse
• Travis Roberts (creator of improved version): http://blog.centresource.com/author/troberts/
• Brent Shaffer (contributor): http://github.com/bshaffer