I stumbled across a post about Automated PHP Deployment With Capistrano and it inspired me to set up Capistrano for a PHP site I maintain. Capistrano makes makes deploying my Rails applications painless. The deployment process for the PHP code was painful.
I started with the deploy.rb file mentioned in the article. I ended up overriding :update_code instead of :deploy. Initially I tried using the default deploy task from standard.rb but :update_code was failing because it couldn’t create a symbolic link. I copied :update_code to my script and modified it to created the links to shared code for my application.
desc "Get code from SVN and create symlinks to shared resources"
task :update_code, :except => { :no_release => true } do
on_rollback { delete release_path, :recursive => true }
source.checkout(self)
run <<-CMD
ln -nfs #{shared_path}/system #{release_path}/system &&
ln -nsf #{shared_path}/gallery #{release_path}/gallery &&
ln -nsf #{shared_path}/albums #{release_path}/albums
CMD
# uncache the list of releases, so that the next time it is called it will
# include the newly released path.
@releases = nil
I also needed to override :restart to do nothing.
desc "Override default restart behavior" task :restart do # do nothing since we're PHP+Apache end
Now deployment is as simple as cap deploy.
And if I goof something up cap rollback can save the day.
