Capistrano Drupal Multi Environment Deployment

UPDATE: This version of the tool currently only works with Capistrano v2.x and lower. It will be updated in the coming months to working with the 3.x branch.

The purpose of this project is to utilize capistrano with shell scripts for the management of your Drupal application from dev to test/staging to production. It provides the following tasks:

• Deploy new codebase (and database updates)
• Rollback codebase (and database) to last snapshot
• Synchronize database between environments
• Synchronize uploaded files (public and private) between environments
• Run updates
• Run cron
• Run cache loading (utilizes http://drupal.org/project/drush_ecl)
• Clear caches

The project utilizes drush to run various tasks (and to make many tasks, particularly synchronization, much easier). So you will need to download drush from http://drupal.org/project/drush (utilize pecl for the easiest approach).

The files that you will need to edit:

1. aliases.drushrc.php - This is the drupal aliases file. You will, specifically, want to edit where to find the application, the server(s) on which it can access the site, along with the path to the private files directory. This will reside in your server user's .drush directory.
2. integration/config/deploy/dev (staging and production) - These files specify to capistrano on where it can find the application, the servers, the username to ssh into the server, along with the repository and various other details.

If your site is only on 2 servers, you can remove whichever deployment environment makes least sense (and similarly if you only have a production environment - get rid of the other 2. You can also add more environments though this will also require updating integration/config/deploy.rb of the names of the new stages / removing the stages that are in that file.

You can also add/remove any tasks as you see fit. The main file you will want this in is integration/Capfile (where you can see all the tasks)

You can either run the tasks within integration directly by providing the ENVIRONMENT:

'cap <ENVIRONMENT> <NAMESPACE:TASK>'

Or use the shell scripts which have this set up already 'bash /path/to/task.sh '

For synchronization tasks, you provide ENVIRONMENT 2 so that the ENVIRONMENT 2 will match what is in ENVIRONMENT:

'bash /path/to/synch_task.sh <ENVIRONMENT> <ENVIRONMENT 2>' 

or

'cap <ENVIRONMENT> drupal:<synch_task_name> -s destination_environment=<ENVIRONMENT 2>'

Best of luck!