Git – Using capistrano to deploy from different git branches

capistranogit

I am using capistrano to deploy a RoR application. The codebase is in a git repository, and branching is widely used in development. Capistrano uses deploy.rb file for it's settings, one of them being the branch to deploy from.

My problem is this: let's say I create a new branch A from master. The deploy file will reference master branch. I edit that, so A can be deployed to test environment. I finish working on the feature, and merge branch A into master. Since the deploy.rb file from A is fresher, it gets merged in and now the deploy.rb in master branch references A. Time to edit again.

That's a lot of seemingly unnecessary manual editing – the parameter should always match current branch name. On top of that, it is easy to forget to edit the settings each and every time.

What would be the best way to automate this process?

Edit: Turns out someone already had done exactly what I needed:

This morning I had occasion to deploy a branch of a git repository to
a staging server but hadn’t the foggiest idea how. A quick search
through the capistrano source code revealed that I could use set
:branch "branch_name" in my deploy script. I tried it and it worked.
I then figured I would need to make a similar change across all my
branches. Of course, I’m a lazy sod and wondered if there wasn’t a
better way.

If you’re not familiar with git, the output of the git branch command
is a list of branches with an asterisk marking the one currently
checked out on your local machine. For example:
> git branch
* drupal_authentication
fragment_caching
master
So, I figured, what if I just parsed the output and searched for the
branch marked as current:
set :branch, $1 if `git branch` =~ /\* (\S+)\s/m
Now I’m able to deploy whatever branch is current on my local machine
from a single, shared, deploy script.

Best Answer

This works with Capistrano >= 3.1:

add this line to config/deploy.rb:

set :branch, ENV['BRANCH'] if ENV['BRANCH']

and then call capistrano with:

cap production deploy BRANCH=master

This solution works with Capistrano < 3.1:

# call with cap -s env="<env>" branch="<branchname>" deploy

set :branch, fetch(:branch, "master")
set :env, fetch(:env, "production")

Related Solutions

Git – How to remove local (untracked) files from the current Git working tree

git-clean - Remove untracked files from the working tree

Synopsis
git clean [-d] [-f] [-i] [-n] [-q] [-e <pattern>] [-x | -X] [--] <path>…
Description

Cleans the working tree by recursively removing files that are not under version control, starting from the current directory.

Normally, only files unknown to Git are removed, but if the -x option is specified, ignored files are also removed. This can, for example, be useful to remove all build products.

If any optional <path>... arguments are given, only those paths are affected.

Step 1 is to show what will be deleted by using the -n option:

# Print out the list of files and directories which will be removed (dry run)
git clean -n -d

Clean Step - beware: this will delete files:

# Delete the files from the repository
git clean -f

To remove directories, run git clean -f -d or git clean -fd
To remove ignored files, run git clean -f -X or git clean -fX
To remove ignored and non-ignored files, run git clean -f -x or git clean -fx

Note the case difference on the X for the two latter commands.

If clean.requireForce is set to "true" (the default) in your configuration, one needs to specify -f otherwise nothing will actually happen.

Again see the git-clean docs for more information.

Options

-f, --force

If the Git configuration variable clean.requireForce is not set to false, git clean will refuse to run unless given -f, -n or -i.

-x

Don’t use the standard ignore rules read from .gitignore (per directory) and $GIT_DIR/info/exclude, but do still use the ignore rules given with -e options. This allows removing all untracked files, including build products. This can be used (possibly in conjunction with git reset) to create a pristine working directory to test a clean build.

-X

Remove only files ignored by Git. This may be useful to rebuild everything from scratch, but keep manually created files.

-n, --dry-run

Don’t actually remove anything, just show what would be done.

-d

Remove untracked directories in addition to untracked files. If an untracked directory is managed by a different Git repository, it is not removed by default. Use -f option twice if you really want to remove such a directory.

Git – How to clone all remote branches in Git

First, clone a remote Git repository and cd into it:

$ git clone git://example.com/myproject
$ cd myproject

Next, look at the local branches in your repository:

$ git branch
* master

But there are other branches hiding in your repository! You can see these using the -a flag:

$ git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/origin/v1.0-stable
  remotes/origin/experimental

If you just want to take a quick peek at an upstream branch, you can check it out directly:

$ git checkout origin/experimental

But if you want to work on that branch, you'll need to create a local tracking branch which is done automatically by:

$ git checkout experimental

and you will see

Branch experimental set up to track remote branch experimental from origin.
Switched to a new branch 'experimental'

Here, "new branch" simply means that the branch is taken from the index and created locally for you. As the previous line tells you, the branch is being set up to track the remote branch, which usually means the origin/branch_name branch.

Now, if you look at your local branches, this is what you'll see:

$ git branch
* experimental
  master

You can actually track more than one remote repository using git remote.

$ git remote add win32 git://example.com/users/joe/myproject-win32-port
$ git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/origin/v1.0-stable
  remotes/origin/experimental
  remotes/win32/master
  remotes/win32/new-widgets

At this point, things are getting pretty crazy, so run gitk to see what's going on:

$ gitk --all &

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Git – How to remove local (untracked) files from the current Git working tree

git-clean - Remove untracked files from the working tree

Synopsis

Description

Options

Git – How to clone all remote branches in Git

Related Topic