Rails Best Practices

I worked on a large project, it contains a lot of capistrano tasks, which makes it more and more difficult to maintain.

Before

After application grows, I saw too much tasks written in config/deploy.rb file, it was messy. e.g.

# config/deploy.rb
require 'capistrano_colors'
require 'bundler/capistrano'

set :user, 'huangzhi'
......
role :web, "app.example.com"
role :app, "app.example.com"
role :db,  "db.example.com", :primary => true

after "deploy", "cron:update"
after "deploy", "sitemap:refresh"
set :assets_dependencies, %w(app/assets lib/assets vendor/assets Gemfile.lock config/routes.rb)

namespace :cron do
  task :update do
    update_app
    update_db
  end
  task :update_app do
    # update cron jobs on app servers
  end
  task :update_db do
    # update cron jobs on db servers
  end
end

namespace :sitemap do
  task :refresh, :roles => :app do
    # generate sitemap.xml for SEO
  end
end

namespace :deploy do
  namespace :assets do
    task :precompile, :roles => :web, :except => { :no_release => true } do
      # precompile asset only when asset changes
    end
  end
end

namespace :deploy do
  task :start do ; end 
  task :stop do ; end 
  task :restart, :roles => :app, :except => { :no_release => true } do
    # restart app servers
  end
end

After

Inspired by require external capistrano recipes (like bundler and rvm), I prefer splitting the tasks into different files according to the functionalities, like

# config/deploy/recipes/asset_pipeline.rb
set :assets_dependencies, %w(app/assets lib/assets vendor/assets Gemfile.lock config/routes.rb)

namespace :deploy do
  namespace :assets do
    task :precompile, :roles => :web, :except => { :no_release => true } do
      # precompile asset only when asset changes
    end
  end
end

# config/deploy/recipes/cron.rb
after "deploy", "cron:update"

namespace :cron do
  task :update do
    update_app
    update_db
  end
  task :update_app do
    # update cron jobs on app servers
  end
  task :update_db do
    # update cron jobs on db servers
  end
end

# config/deploy/recipes/sitemap.rb
after "deploy", "sitemap:refresh"

namespace :sitemap do
  task :refresh, :roles => :app do
    # generate sitemap.xml for SEO
  end
end

We have 3 capistrano recipes, asset_pipeline, cron and sitemap, each with one functionality, and then you can easily load them in config/deploy.rb.

# config/deploy.rb
require 'capistrano_colors'
require 'bundler/capistrano'

set :user, 'huangzhi'
......
role :web, "app.example.com"
role :app, "app.example.com"
role :db,  "db.example.com", :primary => true

load 'config/deploy/recipes/asset_pipeline'
load 'config/deploy/recipes/cron'
load 'config/deploy/recipes/sitemap'

namespace :deploy do
  task :start do ; end 
  task :stop do ; end 
  task :restart, :roles => :app, :except => { :no_release => true } do
    # restart app servers
  end
end

config/deploy.rb looks pretty clean now.

Furthermore, you can autoload custom recipes by changing following code in Capfile

Dir['vendor/plugins/*/recipes/*.rb', 'config/deploy/recipes/*.rb'].each { |plugin| load(plugin) }

You can easily create your own capistrano recipes like this and reuse them in the next projects.

Thank chrishein to share the idea to autoload custom recipes.