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# Blazing fast and painless git push deploys

*Oh no, yet another deployer!*

Not everyone can or wants to deploy on heroku. But now you can have the same awesomely smooth git push deploys on whatever server you have SSH access to.

## Quickstart

`blazing init`, edit the configuration, run `blazing setup:local` and `blazing setup:remote <target>` and you're set. Deploy with `git push <target> <branch>` or setup git to always push your current branch.

## Overview & Background

Blazing is a deployment tool written in Ruby. It provides helpers to setup your project with a git post-receive hook, which is triggered every time you push to your production repository.

I initially started working on an extension to capistrano which would cover most of my needs and the nees of my team. After a short while I noticed that bolting more functionality on top of capistrano was just going to be messy (and a PTA to maintain). We were alerady using tons of own recipes and customizations, capistrano multistage, capistrano-ext, etc.
 
I had a look at what others were doing and after a round of trying around and not getting what I wanted, I started this.
 
## Design Goals

When I started working on blazing, I had some design goals in mind which I think should stay relevant for this project:

- it must be well tested
- it must stay robust, simple and with small code base with as few moving parts as possible. Minimum code in the main project, extensions live outside.
- no messy rake scripts: Define the desired behavior trough a DSL, and extensions add to this DSL in a clean and modular way
- Deployments should be fast

### Inspiration & Alternatives
 
I looked at [Inploy](https://github.com/dcrec1/inploy) and [Vlad](https://github.com/seattlerb/vlad) after having used [Capistrano](https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano) for several
years. Then got inspired by defunkt's
[blog post](https://github.com/blog/470-deployment-script-spring-cleaning) about deployment script spring cleaning. Other's doing a similar thing with git push deployments are Mislav's [git-deploy](https://github.com/mislav/git-deploy) (which was a great inspiration and resource) and [pushand](https://github.com/remi/pushand.git) by remi. If you don't like blazing, you might give them a try.

## Installation

Your machine should be setup with ruby, rubygems, bundler and git. Install blazing by adding it to your `Gemfile` or run `gem install blazing`. The basic assumption from now on will be that you are working on a project with bundler and a Gemfile. Support for other ways to handle dependencies might be added in the future, but for now bundler is required.

## Usage

### Init

Run `blazing init` in your project root to create a sample config file. 

### Configuration

See the generated configuration file or [the template file](https://github.com/effkay/blazing/blob/master/lib/blazing/templates/config.erb) for available configuration options.

### Setup

`blazing setup:local` will setup your local repository for deployment with blazing/git push. Basically, it will add a remote for each target you defined in the configuration file.

`blazing setup:remote <target>` will setup the project on the server side. It will:

* clone the repository to the specified location
* setup the repository to allow a currently checked out branch to be pushed to it
* run ``blazing update``

`blazing update <target>`

Whenever you change something in your blazing config file you can run the update command so your git post-receive hook gets updated.

### Deploying

Just push to your remote… so if you set up a target named `:production`, use `git push production master` to deploy your master branch there.

### Recipes

Right now blazing does the following things out of the box:

* use rvm if you specify it in your config (by passing an rvm string or just `:rvmrc`, which will load the rvmrc)
* checkout the pushed ref… so if you do git push production master, the last commit of the master branch will be checked out. Before doing a checkout blazing will reset to HEAD so no errors happen due to changed files. **This means that you will loose any uncommited changes on the production repository. Having changes there is a bad idea anyway!**
* run bundle --deployment so the dependencies are installed
* run all recipes, in the order that they are defined
* run the rake task if one was specified

Run all recipes? Well yes, blazing can be extended by recipes. So far, these are available:

* [blazing-passenger](https://github.com/effkay/blazing-passenger)
	* `:passenger_restart` will touch `tmp/retart.txt`
	* `:passenger_kickstart, :url => 'http:://somehost'` will do a get requst on somehost to kickstart passenger
* [blazing-rails](https://github.com/effkay/blazing-rails)
	* `:precompile_assets` will precompile the assets when deploying

Feel free to roll your own recipes!

## Development & Contribution

### Improving Blazing itself

If you like blazing and want to improve/fix something, feel free, I'm glad for every pull request. Maybe contact me beforehand so we don't fix the same bugs twice and make sure you stick with a similar code style and have tests in your pull request. 

### Creating custom Blazing Recipes

I would like to add recipes that encapuslate common deployment strategies to blazing. If you have an idea for that, you are welcome to contribute. Right now I am still working on a clever API for this. At the moment the recipe API works as follows:

* recipes should live in gems called `blazing-<somename>`
* blazing converts the symbol given in the config to the class name and calls run on it. So if you have `recipe :passenger_restart` blazing will try to run `Blazing::Recipe::PassengerRestart.run` with the options provided.
* Recipes should live in the `Blazing::Recipe` namespace and inherit from `Blazing::Recipe` as well
* Recipes are run in the order they are specified in the config, so there is no way to handle inter-recipe dependencies yet. 

## Authors

Felipe Kaufmann ([@effkay][])

## License

See the [MIT-LICENSE file](https://github.com/effkay/blazing/blob/master/MIT-LICENCE)

[@effkay]: https://github.com/effkay