Capistrano appserver as service without sudo

Question

Does anyone have a good way to manage the appserver with capistrano?. This seems to be a leave it to your own devices situation, and I've yet to see a good example of it.

There is basically two trains of thoughts I see.

1) Daemonize it as the deploy user. Pros, no system service etc, so no permissions issues. However this wreaks as if the machine is rebooted, blam the system goes down.

2) Init scripts. Installing a init script and using that to manage the server. This would survive reboots, and allow for say /etc/init.d/myapp restart/stop/start control if you ssh'd in. This is decent apart from two reasons

• Most people manage it from capistrano with sudo (I feel like capistrano 3 discourages this)
• I've yet to see a good upstart or the like script that works with unicorn for it.

I'm experimenting with using nginx+unicorn. Nginx I have set perfectly. I've added a site to sites-available and pointed upstream to /appserver/public. This works great, asset precompilation works fantastic and all is well, I can redeploy and be served new assets. It's simple, works with the OS init process. However I've lucked out as the nginx config is basically static, and nginx only has to serve static files.

The appserver.. unicorn/thin/puma/ whatever is the part thats tripping me. I would like it to reload the application on cap deploy, but I'm struggling to find a good enough example of this.

In summary. What is a simple way of having a rails application survive reboots, and reload when cap deploy is called

Answer 1

1. If you use Passenger with your nginx and unicorn or thin... you can restart after deployment by touching tmp/restart.txt file:

   task :restart do
     on roles(:app), in: :sequence, wait: 5 do
       execute :touch, release_path.join('tmp/restart.txt')
     end
   end
   

2. To reload a puma server after deploy use capistrano3-puma:

   Gemfile:

   gem 'capistrano3-puma'
   

   Capfile:

   require 'capistrano/puma'