Capistrano VS Mina

The previous deployment was using capistrano v2, and the client wants to stay with the same deployment method. So I just upgraded the code to use capistrano v3.

Yes, we can! Rolling out new code updates, features and hotfixes is what we do constantly. At context of our web projects written with Ruby on Rails, it’s a question of a single command to start deploy. For this purpose we use capistrano https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano

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

After that is ready just run the mina setup command and it will create mina’s folder structure for your project using the parameters you setup before. Read more info on mina setup on their Getting started guide.

However this model is generic to any client-server / monolithic / micro services approach and to any languages and frameworks. In my project I use Mina (Formerly using Capistrano), so that means that on each deployment the script makes a SSH-in to the remote machine and performs the deployment process: Git clone, Git pull, rake db:migrate assets:precompile, puma:restart, etc… Before using Capistrano I was doing all this manually #sigh.

Same with my experience. I could never get Capistrano to work. I blame the never updated documentation that also missing important details here and there so often. Reading the doc is like walking in the woods. In the end I switched to Mina, and finally everything works.

Not to be confused with Mina: blazing fast application deployment tool (https://github.com/mina-deploy/mina)