dotenv VS Capistrano

This is the second part of my Test Driving a Rails API series. In Part 1 we set up our development environment, generated a Rails API-only application, installed dotenv to easily store configuration values in the environment, and installed and configured PostgreSQL version 16 as our database.

Storing environment variables for a Rails app can be problematic. The dotenv gem will automatically, when Rails boots, load environment variables from .env files into the Rails ENV. This is a great way to store private information that varies per developer or deployment environment, such as your development database configuration. Rails Encrypted Credentials is a great way to store private information, like API keys, etc, but I wouldn’t use it for storing my local development environment’s database information. The Encrypted Credentials file is checked into the git repository and would, therefore, be shared by all developers on the project. dotenv allows each developer or deployment environment to store their own information in .env files that are ignored by git.

dotenv

Install the dotenv gem.

dotenv-rails

Yeah, now that I think of it, it does require a gem. I have used this in most projects https://github.com/bkeepers/dotenv

If you don't want to go down the NFS share route then Capistrano is a useful tool if you're willing to write a little bit of ruby. It comes with some built in goodies like rollbacks. It's an oldie (pre-dockerize everything), but still useful.

https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano

You can start by deploying from your machine to simultaneously get it deploying across all your servers, then I'd consider having a CI/CD pipeline take over and run Capistrano for you.

- Integrate automation deployment: [capistrano](https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano)

Integrate automation deployment: capistrano

The deployment process generally includes making the new version available, directing traffic from the old to the new version, and stopping the old versions. Capistrano has been doing this since 2006. However, what makes Kubernetes deployments better is the minimum number of pods required, and its rollout strategy minimizes or eliminates downtime. For example, a rolling update strategy can ensure new pods gradually replace old pods with configs like maxSurge and maxUnavailable. Because this is done in a declarative way, as a user or operator, you only need to ask Kubernetes to apply a given deployment and Kubernetes does the rest. Next up is the Kubernetes config map.

[1] https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano

Capistrano

What I had considered was writing a deployment script where upon successful build in a separate folder, it'd swap out the deployed folder, similar to how Capistrano works. It has a "current" folder and it'll build in a temporary folder and then replace the symlink to a newer build.

capistrano with plugins for deployment

deployer is a deployment tool written in PHP. It comes with "Zero Downtime Deployments" out of the box and can be extended by writing simple PHP code. (capistrano would be the equivalent in the Ruby world).

Capistrano, if you like Ruby.