deployment

deployment

Continuous Deployment for the masses.

Download the latest version of your git package, run all tests and deploy to the specified directory. Run a deployment server to launch deployments from the internet, and integrate with GitHub easily. Includes an API to fire deployments from an external source.

Installation

Install from npm:

$ npm install deployments

Or add to your package.json as a dependency.

For manual installation, download from GitHub:

$ git clone https://github.com/alexfernandez/deployment

Install node modules:

$ cd deployment
$ npm install

Et voilà!

Usage

There are three basic ways to start a deployment.

Command Line

To start a deployment from the command line:

$ node lib/deployment.js

Will launch a deployment, using the current directory as deployment directory. The temp directory will be called like current, but reside in ../test'. For instance, if your current directory is /home/af/projects/x', the default test directory will be `/home/af/projects/test/x'.

Web Server

When your server can be reached from the internet, you can start a web server that will listen to requests, by default on port 3470.

$ node bin/deployment-server.js --token wydjzfoytrg4grmy

Any requests coming in with the special, magic token will result in a deployment. From localhost use this URL:

http://localhost:3470/wydjzfoytrg4grmy/deploy

You should see an OK message, or "Bad request" if an incorrect URL is sent.

If a token is not passed and therefore the default token is used, a warning will be shown. To generate a good, random token just write at your Bash console:

$ echo "$(head -c 16 /dev/random | base64 | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' | sed 's/\/\+//g' | head -c 16)"

To access from the outside you can

http://localhost:3470/wydjzfoytrg4grmy/deploy

The resulting external URL can be added as a webhook to GitHub.

API

You can also start a deployment using the API.

Process

The process is standardized as follows:

• update code in test directory,
• update node modules in test directory,
• run package tests in test directory,
• update code in deployment directory,
• update node modules in test directory.

As console commands, the sequence would be: $ git pull /home/af/projects/test/x $ npm install /home/af/projects/test/x $ npm test /home/af/projects/test/x $ git pull /home/af/projects/x $ npm install /home/af/projects/x

Service Restart

You will note that we have not mentioned any restart as part of the deployment process. By default `deployment' does not deal with service restart, so how does the new code enter into service? There are several alternatives.

First, deployment' can be configured to run a specified command, passing it an option deploymentCommand' from the API.

Second, the service could be run using `supervisor', which would restart the service automatically right after downloading the new code.

Another option is to run your services in cluster mode, rebooting each worker after a specified time. This scheme does not mesh well with database schema updates, or any other irreversible changes.