Merb and Capistrano

In the interest of kicking my butt into posting more, I’m going to put up a sample deploy file for a merb app we launched about a month ago. Below is an example capistrano 1.4 file that I use for a merb app that runs on active record and sqlite3. It’s a small stat program that grabs analytics in the flash carousel on nd.edu.

set :application, "myapp"
set :user, "deploy"
set :domain, "yourdomain.com"
set :repository, "svn+ssh://#{user}@#{domain}/var/www/apps/repos/#{application}/trunk"
set :deploy_to, "/var/www/apps/#{application}"

role :app, domain
role :web, domain
role :db, domain, :primary => true

desc "Link in the production extras"
task :after_symlink do
	# symlink log path
  run "ln -nfs #{shared_path}/log #{release_path}/log"
	# symlink path to database, this is only needed if you are using sqlite (which is ok for little things and is really easy)
  run "ln -nfs #{shared_path}/db/#{application}_production.sqlite3 #{release_path}/db/#{application}_production.sqlite3"
end

desc "Merb it up"
task :restart do
  run "cd #{current_path};./script/stop_merb"
  # run "cd #{current_path};env EVENT=1 merb -e production -c 1" # for evented mongrel
  run "cd #{current_path}; merb -e production -c 1" # plain old mongrel
end

Once you have everything configured, deployment is as easy as cap setup and cap deploy (you’ll probably need to migrate your db as well).

We (the notre dame web group) are now using Merb for two production applications and are finding it a nice change of pace from Rails. If you want to learn more, peter cooper has a crap load of links for merb at ruby inside.