Turn and Push

This is a RESTful service to automate Jekyll and Octopress websites building and deployment process, using GitHub web hooks for source update notification.

Turn and Push is Sinatra-based application intended (but not limited) to run on Raspberry Pi and use rsync, AWS CLI or any other tool to deliver static content to the destination web server.

Installation

This guide assumes:

• Ruby 2.0 and Bundler are already present in the system.
• rbenv is used to control Ruby versions.
• The server is Raspberry Pi running Raspbian Linux.
• Website sources are hosted on GitHub.
• You are using SSH password-less access for private projects (if there are any).
• You are using rsync for web content deployment, and the access to the destination web servers are preconfigured as well.

The only strict prerequisite here is Ruby. TnP could be deployed on ordinary PC hardware running pretty much any major Linux distribution.

Getting everything up and running

Get it to the Pi.

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/turnandpush
cd /var/www/turnandpush
sudo chown pi:pi -R .
git clone git@github.com:dreikanter/turnandpush.git current
cd current
bundle install

Update server_name value in the config/nginx.conf to the actual domain value.

Copy config/example-sources.yml to config/sources.yml and update it with the actual sources configuration.

Configure password-less Git access for each website repo via SSH.

Configure password-less SSH access for each deployment destination.

Add http://{your-domain}/handle to Settings/Service Hooks/WebHook URLs list for each GitHub repo with Jekyll sources, you need to process.

If you want to publish GitHub wiki pages, you should also enable wiki events for this webhook.

Check deployment configuration inside rakefiles for each Jekyll project. It should work properly on build server environment. Example is below.

ssh_user       = "admin@example.com"
ssh_port       = "22"
document_root  = "/var/www/example.com/current/"
rsync_delete   = true
rsync_args     = ""
deploy_default = "rsync"

Configure nginx.

sudo apt-get install nginx
sudo ln -s /var/www/turnandpush/current/config/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/turnandpush
sudo service nginx restart

For Raspberry Pi: install upstart if it was not installed before.

sudo apt-get install upstart --force-yes

Configure upstart to run unicorn on boot up.

sudo ln -s /var/www/turnandpush/current/config/upstart.conf /etc/init/turnandpush.conf

Reboot, check if there are nginx and unicorn in the process list (ps aux), and test GitHub web hooks to see everything is working.

Troubleshooting

• "Liquid Exception: Pygments can't parse unknown language: ruby."

  Jekyll/Octopress uses pygments.rb gem, which is Ruby wrapper for Python Pygments library. Make shure the default Python version on your system is 2.7.*. Pygments is not working with Python 3 for some reason.

• "YAML Exception reading invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII"

  This error could be caused by BOM prefix in post/page files, or bad system locale. To fix second problem TNP overrides LC_CTYPE and LANG environment variables with the value of en_US.UTF-8. To fix the first problem (if encountered) just save text files without BOM with your text editor.

• At the moment of writing Octopress may crash when using Ruby 2.0. Make shure 1.9.3 is installed in your system, and use your Ruby version manager (rbenv or RVM) to define specific version for the build.

API

Handling URL:

http://{domain}/handle

Manual build request:

GET http://{domain}/build/{name}

{name} should be a GitHub source repository name defined in sources.yml. For example to build http://github.com/dreikanter/jekyll-test.git from example-sources.yml, you should seng GET request to http://turnandpush.domain.com/build/jekyll-example.

Log tail request:

GET http://{domain}/log/{lines-number}

{lines-number} is an optional parameter to specify amount of lines to get from the end of log file. By default /log will return 10 lines.

Manual publish request for GitHub project wiki:

GET http://{domain}/publish/{name}

{name} should be a GitHum wiki source name defined in wikis.yml. See example-wikis.yml for configuration samples.

Why Turn and Push?

You don't want to know ಠ_ಠ