Deploying on Brightbox ☆

I’m currently working on an app that we’re going to be deploying on Brightbox. However, I ran into a couple of problems when deploying with their gem.

First, my app’s Subversion repository isn’t on the Brightbox server. This was simple, in the config/deploy.rb file, change the address of the repository to the address of the server. Create a SSH key on the Brightbox box (mouthful!) and add the public key to the .ssh/authorized_keys on my Subversion server and away we go!

Second, I don’t have my config/database.yml in the svn repository. The reasons for this are # Security – if someone checks out my code they end up knowing my passwords. # there are several people working on the project so every time a commit/update was performed, it would reset your config/database.yml file to whatever the last checked in version was, annoying. In the config/deploy.rb file I added:

  task :after_update_code do
    run( "cp $HOME/database.yml #{release_path}/config/")
  end

to the config file and put the database.yml file in my home directory. Now, after the code’s been checked out the database.yml file is copied into the correct place. Hurrah!

The third thing was really my fault. I’d put a - in my database name. The Brightbox gem doesn’t escape the CREATE DATABASE database_name database name (it should really be CREATE DATABASE `database_name`). MySQL was interpreting my - as subtraction, oops. I changed the name of the database to only use underscores and it worked fine.

The final thing was as far as I can tell the gem is running the Capistrano setup task. This sets up the shared directory in your application deployment and will not run without it. I added

  task :before_cold_deploy do
    setup
  end

to config/deploy.rb to run the Capistrano setup task.

Then… HURRRAH! It works!!!