SimpleDeploy

Purpose

I developed simple deploy over a weekend, as I wanted a way of monitoring and deploying to the servers of my startup without hassle. I couldn't find any simple, easy, non bloated and free solutions, so I wrote my own.

There is still plenty of work that could be done, so please feel free to contribute. This is tested on CentOS.

Usage

On the box

state

Running global state on any server setup with SimpleDeploy will yield for example:

[jobe@rabbit bin]$ global state
[STATE - commander (commander)] - is RUNNING (pid = 24138, uptime = 15:55:12)
[STATE - rabbit (governor)] - is RUNNING (pid = 24146, uptime = 15:55:12)

lesslog

Above we have two processes installed, one commander and one governor, named rabbit. These have been running for 15 hours each.

If I want to view the logs of rabbit, I simply run:

global lesslog rabbit

and immediately the log is opened in less.

start/stop/restart

I can restart rabbit:

[jobe@rabbit bin]$ global restart rabbit
[STOP - rabbit (governor)] - success
[START - rabbit (governor)] - started

Or I can restart all processes on the server:

[jobe@rabbit bin]$ global restart
[STOP - commander (commander)] - success
[START - commander (commander)] - started
[STOP - rabbit (governor)] - success
[START - rabbit (governor)] - started

I can do the same thing with stop and start.

Scheduled jobs

For automatically maintaining your server and keeping things running, I suggest using cron. I've set mine up like this:

MAILTO="michael@michael.com"

# Every minute check processes are running, restart if necessary and send an email.
* * * * * source /home/jobe/.bashrc; global audit_regular

# Every day, send an email describing the state of the host and its jobs.
0 5 * * * source /home/jobe/.bashrc; global audit_daily

# Every Monday at 7am, archive the logs.
0 7 * * 1 source /home/jobe/.bashrc; global archive_logs

The scripts echo output expecting that output to be forwarded somewhere e.g. emailed to you.

In the above setup, I receive a daily email which looks like this:

[AUDIT_DAILY - commander (commander)] - [GREEN] - No recent automatic restarts detected, this is good
[AUDIT_DAILY - commander (commander)] - [GREEN] - is RUNNING (pid = 9322, uptime = 07:51:09)
[AUDIT_DAILY - rabbit (governor)] - [GREEN] - No recent automatic restarts detected, this is good
[AUDIT_DAILY - rabbit (governor)] - [GREEN] - is RUNNING (pid = 9344, uptime = 07:51:09)

Disk space stats
Use%
  1%

and if a process crashes it is automatically restarted, and on the first crash, I get a more concerning email.

Deployment

SimpleDeploy gives you the ability to run one command from your development machine, and deploy and restart on all hosts in your estate.

For example:

./deploy -hf hosts/examplehosts -i

where hosts/examplehosts contains:

myserver.domain.com
myotherserver.domain.com

This will deploy the latest package (by modification time) in SimpleDeploy/builds to both servers. Because of the 'i' flag, it will then install the package on both hosts. Installing involves extracting the archive and restarting processes.

Setup

Setup the ~/.bashrc

Parts of the script will source ~/.bashrc, so this needs to be setup correctly on any host that you deploy to. You need to include the following variables:

• LOG_DIR: Full path to where log files should be stored. All standard output and standard error is forwarded to a log file in this directory.
• PACKAGE_DIR: When using the deploy script, directory where packages should be copied to.
• PROJECT_DIR:Root directory where archives are extracted to. This directory must also include bin at $PROJECT_DIR/bin, where bin is the folder containing the scripts of SimpleDeploy. I recommend that your packaging script packages in bin at the root of the archive, so that when extracted it will push the latest version automatically.
• PATH: I recommend that you include the bin directory in your path, so that you can run "global" from any directory.

Setup your SSH keys

You want to be able to deploy without typing in passwords, so I suggest setting up SSH keys from your deployment machine onto the servers of your estate.

Setup scheduled jobs

Setup your scheduled jobs (I use cron), this is explained in the "Scheduled Jobs" section of "Usage".

What do I need to do?

This should work out of the box, all you need to do is make a packaging script to build the .tgz deploy package for your application.