Notes to self

Deployment woes.

I code in Java at work, and all of my projects can be divided into two camps:

1. Those that build to .jar files and deploy to our maven2 repo.
   
2. And those that build to .war files and are deployed to some application server.
   

Once configured, maven itself is pretty good at making case #1 run smoothly - "mvn deploy" is all it really takes. But do I have anything similar for case #2?

Well, not quite. I tried banging something together with Capistrano, but that didn't work. For one thing, Capistrano expects you to be deploying a Rails application and these are typically all deployed in the same way, which is very different from deploying a .war file. Secondly, I had a build/compile step in my process that I needed to do locally (because compiling on the server is troublesome and a bad idea), this meant that I had to use the put function to upload my .war file. Put worked nicely for small text files (ie. my project.properties file), but failed miserably when the payload war a near 20 MB heavy .war file.
Googling and tweaking the flags on the File object didn't work. It simply refused to upload that damn .war file.

Itch-scratchers mentality.

I suppose I could have written a shell script and leveraged the existing scp and ssh tool chain. And I did throw a pebble down this route to see how it felt, but eventually rejected the idea. The reason is that I'm deploying to multiple hosts simultaneously. I tried looking at clusterssh to see if it would help me in this regard, but it turned out to be odd, klonky and basicly not designed for such a task. I also took a look at Dancer's Shell, dsh, which was a lot closer to home, but my username contains a backslash and dsh meticulously stripped it out prior to logging in, foiling any and all of my attempts at tricking it into taking it at face value.

What was I suppose to do? I had pretty much given up on automating the process and started to accept defeat, when I happened upon the paramiko module for python. Paramiko is a pure python implementation of the SSH 2 protocol, and lets you log into servers, execute commands and upload files. It prompted me to the idea to write my own pythonic version of a Capistrano like tool, and then use that for deployment. It could be made open source and a perfect oppotunity try out Git on a real project.

Birth of Fabric.

So I swiftly went to work. In two days, I had written the first prototype. It supported the most basic operations such as running remote shell commands, sudo'ing and uploading files. Then I registered my project on nongnu.org (chosen because of their Git support). And ba-da-bim, Fabric became an open source project: https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/fab/

Fabric looks, on the surface at least (or for those who've only spent a short while with either), a lot like Capistrano. You have a fabfile (as oppose to a capfile) in you project directory, and that file describes all of your deployment tasks (or commands, in Fabric speak).

Commands are really just regular python functions (and you're allowed to call it fabfile.py if you like) that simply makes calls to some other, more magical, functions called operations. Operations are magical because they just sort of exist; you don't import them from a module and don't find them in an object - you just call them.

So, to get the feet wet, here's a hello-world'ish simple fabfile:

set(
    fab_user = 'joe.shmoe',
    fab_mode = 'rolling', # run stuff on one host at a time
    fab_hosts = ['node1.servers.com', 'node2.servers.com'],
)

def deploy():
    "Build and deploy a war file to our app. servers."
    local("mvn clean package")
    put("target/myapp.war", "myapp.war")
    run("mkdir /rollback/$(fab_timestamp)")
    run("cp /$(fab_host)/deply/myapp.war /rollback/$(fab_timestamp)/myapp.war")
    sudo("cp myapp.war /$(fab_host)/deploy/myapp.war")
    sudo("$(fab_host) restart")

Then, all it takes to deploy is a "fab deploy" in the directory where the above file is found. It's still pretty basic, low-level and imparative, but it's a good start.

Fabric also has a built in help system that is powered by your doc-strings; try typing "fab help:deploy" for instance. If you want to see what other commands are availble to you, then simply type "fab list". You can also get a list of operations (the local(), put(), run(), sudo() kind of things) by typing "fab help:ops" and get more details about the individual operation with, for instance, "fab help:put".

And that's basically it for today.