Ansistrano (Ansible + Capistrano): Quick Start

In this post, I am going to try Ansistrano to deploy a file on a web server.

(See this post this post for detail about Ansible)

what is Ansistrano?

"ansistrano.deploy and ansistrano.rollback are Ansible roles to easily manage the deployment process for scripting applications such as PHP, Python and Ruby. It's an Ansible port for Capistrano." (https://github.com/ansistrano/deploy)

install

% ansible-galaxy install ansistrano.deploy ansistrano.rollback

create test file

% mkdir -p public_html 
% echo 'hello' > public_html/index.html 

deploy

% vim playbook.yml

---
- name: deploy code
  hosts: webservers
  become: true

  vars:
    ansistrano_deploy_from: "{{ playbook_dir }}/public_html/"
    ansistrano_deploy_to: "/var/www/my-app"
    ansistrano_keep_releases: 3
    ansistrano_deploy_via: "rsync"
  roles:
    - ansistrano.deploy

See https://github.com/ansistrano/deploy for the vars to customize as needed.

Run the playbook.

% ansible-playbook playbook.yml

On the server side, the directories and files are created in Capistorano way.

$ tree /var/www/my-app/
/var/www/my-app/
|-- current -> ./releases/20210531110928Z
|-- releases
|   `-- 20210531110928Z
|       |-- index.html
|       `-- REVISION
`-- shared

If you run it again, you can see the new directory is created under releases and the simlink has been redirected.

% ansible-playbook playbook.yml

$ tree /var/www/my-app/
/var/www/my-app/
|-- current -> ./releases/20210531111245Z
|-- releases
|   |-- 20210531110928Z
|   |   |-- index.html
|   |   `-- REVISION
|   `-- 20210531111245Z
|       |-- index.html
|       `-- REVISION
`-- shared

rollback

% vim rollback.yml

---
- name: rollback deployment
  hosts: webservers
  become: true

  vars:
    ansistrano_deploy_to: "/var/www/my-app"
  roles:
    - ansistrano.rollback

% ansible-playbook rollback.yml

$ tree /var/www/my-app/
/var/www/my-app/
|-- current -> ./releases/20210531110928Z
|-- releases
|   `-- 20210531110928Z
|       |-- index.html
|       `-- REVISION
`-- shared