Play Capistrano Module

Very draft of the module, contributions are welcome

This module is released under Apache License 2.0

This is a very first draft of a Play module allowing to deploy easily a play app on a remote server with Capistrano, this marvelous remote control tool!
Capistrano is written in Ruby and if you are like me, a complete noob in Ruby, you certainly don’t want to write any line of Ruby within a Play application.
This module is aimed at that without preventing people more skilled in Capistrano and Ruby to do what they want.

How-To

Install/Learn Capistrano

I had problems using Ubuntu Synaptic packages so I installed manually with RVM and this is perfect. Go there

To learn the basics of Capistrano, go there

Install Play Capistrano module in your conf/dependencies.yml

play -> capistrano 1.0.0

Don’t forget to run the traditional play deps

Run the play capify command

Play-Capistrano module is delivered with one single command for the time being:

play capify

This command copies the following required Capistrano files to your project (this is not perfect because it duplicates files from module):

• Capfile : the file expected by Capistrano containing the main entry point for it
• conf/play-recipes.rb : the deploy commands traditionaly provided by capistrano and tuned to Play
• conf/deploy.rb : the specific configuration file containing the remote servers/VCS addresses YOU MUST EDIT THIS FILE AND PUT YOUR CONFIG IN IT
• run.sh : a simple shell file (yes only linux support currently) containing the command to launch Play server in background.

For an unknown reason, it’s impossible to run a background shell command from capistrano directly and you must wrap it into a shell.

Edit conf/deploy.rb with your remote/VCS config

Just edit the file and replace parts in UPPER CASE

Then you enter into Capistrano world…

A few links:

• Beginner tutorial
• Deploy lifecycle

The tweaked Capistrano Play recipes

Thanks to this Stackoverflow post for giving me a very good ground knowing my complete incompetence in Ruby:

Team Notifications

You can setup team notifications every time a deployment happens through Hipchat by following this tutorial.

Deploying to Multiple Environments

You can also use Capistrano to deploy to multiple environments (staging, production, etc). For more information, please see this tutorial which goes over the changes necessary on play-recipes.rb you need to make to deploy to multiple environments without the multistage extension.

Please find more information on how to deploy to multiple environments on Felipe Oliveira’s Blog.

cap deploy:start

This remote start the server in nohup using the run.sh to make it background.

cap deploy:stop

This remote stops the server.

cap deploy:restart

This remote stops/starts the server.

cap play:logs

This “tail -f” remote logs.

cap play:kill

This kills the remote server.

cap play:ps

This view remote process info.

cap play:pid

This retrieves play application pid.

cap play:status

This retrieves play application status.

cap play:version

This retrieves play application version.