If you encounter problems with your deployment and the default output isn't helping you, there is a handful of things you can do. First of all, try running whatever command you are running with the --verbose flag. This will display a lot more informations on what is happening.
The two main informations that are added, are what commands are run on the server, and what exactly is happening on the server, in real time:
$ rocketeer deploy --verbose|-- Running: Deploy (Deploys the website) [~14.25s]
|---- Running: Primer (Run local checks to ensure deploy can proceed)
|---- Running: CreateRelease (Creates a new release on the server) [~5.98s]
|------ Running strategy for Deploy: Sync
$ mkdir /home/www/myapp/releases/20140817160812
$ rsync ./ user@host:/home/www/myapp/releases/20140817160812 --verbose --recursive --rsh="ssh" --exclude=".git" --exclude="vendor"
[local] building file list ... done
[local] .gitattributes
[local] [...]
[local] sent 970690 bytes received 1910 bytes 84573.91 bytes/sec
[local] total size is 964547 speedup is 0.99
|---- Running: Dependencies (Installs or update the dependencies on server) [~5.15s]
|------ Running strategy for Dependencies: Composer
$ cd /home/www/myapp/releases/20140817160812
$ /usr/local/bin/composer install --no-interaction --no-dev --prefer-dist
[user@host] (production) Loading composer repositories with package information
[user@host] (production) Installing dependencies from lock file
[user@host] (production) [...]
[user@host] (production)
[user@host] (production) Generating autoload files
[user@host] (production) Generating optimized class loader
[user@host] (production) Compiling common classes
[user@host] (production) Compiling views
|---- Running: Migrate (Migrates and/or seed the database) [~0.21s]
|------ Running strategy for Migrate: Artisan
$ rm -rf /home/www/myapp/current
$ ln -s /home/www/myapp/releases/20140817160812 /home/www/myapp/current
Successfully deployed release 20140817160812
|-- Running: Cleanup (Clean up old releases from the server) [~2.68s]
$ rm -rf /home/www/myapp/releases/20140817135635
Removing 1 release from the server
Execution time: 27.4618s
If your deployment seems to be unusually slow, I recommend you check the times displayed in brackets displayed next to each task name:
|---- Running: CreateRelease (Creates a new release on the server) [~5.98s]
This time is an average of the recorded execution times of this task. If you deployed twice and it took 10s and 8s, it'll display [~8s]. This time is an estimation and does not represent the actual time the task will time, it's just a prediction based on previous observations.
If you find yourself in a situation where Rocketeer fails to execute a certain command, first of all, check that with the same credentials you are able to run that command yourself. Rocketeer only does what you tell him to, if there is a problem on your server that is preventing a command from working, it will encounter the same problem.
There is however one main difference between Rocketeer and you: Rocketeer will by default run into a shell-less session. That means it doesn't login with Bash or Zsh, which is problematic for certain tools (like RVM, NVM, etc.) that are loaded via your .bashrc or .zshrc file.
To work around the problem, Rocketeer has an option to run certain commands in a shell, you can configure it in the remote.php file:
// Execution
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// If enabled will force a shell to be created
// which is requried for some tools like RVM or NVM
'shell' => false,
// An array of commands to run under shell
'shelled' => ['npm ', 'bundle ', 'grunt'],Simply enable the shell option and add whatever command you need to be logged in for in the array. Those are matched against the command, meaning it can match only part of the executed command.