Summary

The goal of capistrano-cook is to make single-server Rails hosting solutions a breeze to set up. It started out as a collection of the recipes presented on RailsCasts on server provisioning based on Capistrano. Since then, the recipes have been extended and adapted. capistrano-cook has primarily been tested on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Getting Started

Add to your Gemfile:

gem 'capistrano-cook', :git => 'https://github.com/subsis/capistrano-cook.git'

Also, add gem "unicorn", :group => :production, if you haven't already. Then run:

bundle install

To use the default configuration, add the following to your config/deploy.rb file:

require "capistrano-cook"

This will include recipes for the default setup (see below for a description). If you want to customize your deployment setup, check out the wiki.

You need to configure Capistrano as you would otherwise. The following is an example of a minimal config/deploy.rb-file:

require "bundler/capistrano"
require "capistrano-cook"

server "77.66.59.249", :app, :web, :db, :primary => true

set :domain,    "mydomain.com"
set :rails_env, :production

set :application, "myappname"
set :user,        "myappname"

set :scm,         "git"
set :repository,  "git@github.com:myorganization/myappname.git"
set :branch,      "production"
set :deploy_to,   "/var/www/#{application}"
set :deploy_via,  :remote_cache

set :use_sudo,      true

default_run_options[:pty]   = true
ssh_options[:forward_agent] = true

Now you're ready to set up the server, and we need to create a deployment user (you will be prompted for the password of the root-user):

cap root:add_user

This will create a sudo user with the same name as your app, and prompt for a password. Then install the required packages:

cap deploy:install

You're now ready to set up your app, and deploy it for the first time:

cap deploy:setup deploy:cold

This will create deployment folder structure under /var/www/myappname, create the database, install your app as a service, and configure Nginx.

Default Stack

The default stack is configured as follows:

• MySQL 5.5 (from ppa:nathan-renniewaldock)
• Nginx (from ppa:nginx/stable)
• Ruby 1.9.3-p125
• rbenv
• Unicorn with rolling restarts (as describe in RailsCast 373. Installed as an sysinit service. Defaults to 2 workers processes.
• Monit monitors Unicorn worker processes, and gracefully restarts workers that use more than 120MB RAM, or an average of 25% CPU over 2 minutes.
• logrotate with weekly rotation, 10 weeks compressed history.
• nodejs (from ppa:chris-lea/node.js) for asset precompilation.