Server Setup

Utopia is designed to make deployment to remote servers easy.

Deployment

The preferred method of deployment to a production server is via git. The utopia command assists with setup of a remote git repository on the server. It will setup a git post-update hook which will deploy the site correctly and restart passenger for that site.

To setup a server for deployment:

$ mkdir /srv/http/www.example.com
$ cd /srv/http/www.example.com
$ sudo -u http utopia server create

On your development machine, you should setup the git remote:

$ git remote add production ssh://remote/srv/http/www.example.com
$ git push --set-upstream production master

Default Environment

Utopia will load config/environment.yaml and update ENV before executing any code. You can set default environment values using the utopia command:

$ sudo -u http utopia environment RACK_ENV=production DATABASE_ENV=production_cluster_primary
ENV["RACK_ENV"] will default to "production" unless otherwise specified.
ENV["DATABASE_ENV"] will default to "production_cluster_primary" unless otherwise specified.

To set a value, write KEY=VALUE. To unset a key, write KEY.

When you run rake tasks or spawn a server, the values in config/environment.yaml will be the defaults. You can override them by manually specifying them, e.g. DATABASE_ENV=development rake db:info.

Platform

The best deployment platform for Utopia is Linux. Specifically, Arch Linux with the following packages:

• nginx-mainline-passenger
• passenger-nginx-module

There have been issues with the official packages and thus these packages were developed and tested with Utopia deployment in mind.

Sample Nginx Configuration

Create a configuration file for your site, e.g. /etc/nginx/sites/www.example.com:

server {
	listen 80;
	server_name www.example.com;
	root /srv/http/www.example.com/public;
	passenger_enabled on;
}

server {
	listen 80;
	server_name example.com;
	rewrite ^ http://www.example.com$uri permanent;
}

Sudo Setup

Create a file /etc/sudoers.d/http with the following contents:

# Allow user samuel to check out code as user http using git:
%wheel ALL=(http) NOPASSWD: ALL

This allows the deploy task to correctly checkout code as user http.