(Semi)automated deployment with Git and services on Uberspace

Note: This script was created to run at the German hosting service Uberspace using Gitolite and daemontools. To run it on a different environment, it has to be adjusted slightly.

What does it do?

This script (a pimped Git "post-receive" hook) allows you to start an automated deployment of your application on each push to your Uberspace server.

It …

• stops any running instance of your app-service
• pulls a local copy of the current revision
• executes a customizable deployment script to update your dependencies
• logs the deployment to your service log
• and restarts the service

Pushing to different branches on the remote creates separate applications (with the master branch used for production), so you can easily set-up development and qa deployments for your application.

Prerequisites

• Configure Gitolite on your Uberspace account (German how-to)
• Create a new repository in your local Gitolite config (in conf/gitolite.conf) and push the update.
• Either pull the new Git repository to your machine:
  git clone ssh://<username>@<host>.uberspace.de/<yourrepo>.git
  or add it as a new remote to an existing repositroy:
  git remote add uberspace ssh://<username>@<host>.uberspace.de/<yourrepo>.git

Setup

Copy the contents of this repository to your remote host. There,

• Copy post-receive to yourrepo.git/hooks/post-receive. The script makes a few assumptions that you can adjust to your liking:
  • The deployed applications will be in ~/apps
  • The daemontools services will be in ~/service
• Copy dummy-service.js to ~/service/dummy-service.js

Now you can push for the first time to the new remote. If no service is found, the script will create a dummy service for you. Afterwards, you need to edit two files in the service directory:

• deploy: This script is executed on each subsequent deployment. You can define custom steps here like installing dependencies.
• run: This will be called each time the service is started

When you're done setting everything up, call deploy once to make your service ready for running, then svc -du <yourservice> to actually start the service. This needs only to be done manually on the first set-up, all follow up deployments will execute these steps automatically.

License

MIT