Meaniscule Digital Ocean Deployer

This script aims to help you deploy your Meaniscule site to Digital Ocean with ease and win.

Contents

• Requirements
• Assumptions
• Installation and execution
• User input
• Results
  • The nginx server block
  • The tree
  • The post-receive hook
  • The local remote settings

Requirements

Local

• A local git repo containing a Meaniscule app

Server

• Ubuntu 14.04 or higher*
• sudo privileges
• nginx**
• pm2**

*Might work on older versions of Ubuntu, but it hasn't been tested

**The script will check to see if you have nginx and pm2 installed, and if you don't, it will optionally offer to install them for you.

Assumptions

The script assumes that:

• you want to deploy the site within your /var/www directory
• you want to add your nginx server file /etc/nginx/sites-available
• you want to make a symbolic link to your nginx server file in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled

Installation and execution

Install the script on your server. One way to do this is to git clone it into your user directory.

To make the script executable, cd into the directory containing the script and enter:

chmod +x do-deploy.sh

Now you can run the script by typing in:

sudo ./do-deploy.sh

sudo will be required in most cases.

User input

The script will ask the user for:

• nginx server_name
• port
• app name (used as nginx filename and app directory name)

For example:

example.com www.example.com
4545
example.com

This makes a new nginx server for example.com and www.example.com listening on port 4545, and sets up your app's file tree in /var/www.

Results

The script does the following:

• adds a new nginx server listening on the specified port and reloads nginx
• makes a new tree and initializes a --bare git repo
• adds a post-receive hook for git
• tells you how to set this repo as a remote for your local repo

The nginx server block

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name example.com www.example.com;

  location / {
    proxy_pass         http://127.0.0.1:4545;
  }
}

The tree

/var/www/example.com
├── live
└── repo
    └── site.git
        ├── branches
        ├── config
        ├── description
        ├── HEAD
        ├── hooks
        │   └── post-receive
        ├── info
        │   └── exclude
        ├── objects
        │   ├── info
        │   └── pack
        └── refs
            ├── heads
            └── tags

The post-receive hook

Here is the default post-receive hook that this script will make (using our dog-site example):

#!/bin/sh
git --work-tree=/var/www/example.com/live --git-dir=/var/www/example.com/repo/site.git checkout -f
cd /var/www/example.com/live
npm install
gulp build

pm2 describe example.com
if [ \$? != 0 ]
then
        pm2 start server/start.js -i 0 --name example.com
else
        pm2 restart example.com
fi

In other words, after running git push live master from your local repo, the post-receive script will:

• configure your git work tree and repo
• install npm modules (if there are new ones to install)
• run a gulp build process then exit gulp
• either restart the pm2 process for the site or create a pm2 process for the site if one doesn't already exist

The local remote settings

When the Digital Ocean Deployer script is finished running, it will give you these two lines, which are meant to be used in your local repo:

git remote add live ssh://ash@SERVER_IP_OR_DOMAIN/var/www/example.com/repo/site.git
git push live master

The first line sets your local repo's live remote to point to the server's repo (the one that the script just created for you). Enter this first line into your local repo right away.

The second line is what you will use any time you want to deploy to your server: git push live master.

Note: this git push has nothing to do with GitHub or any other remote origin. If you are open sourcing on GitHub, you can push to GitHub with git push origin master without ever affecting your deployed site. This way you can push to and pull from GitHub until you are ready to deploy. Then when you are ready, you can enter git push live master which will deploy your local repo directly to your server.