Installation installs all required software and code. From then on all code updates - including database migrations - are much easier as we no longer need to install Ruby, Nginx, MySQL, etc.:

• on local installations (e.g. using Virtualbox) update all code with git pull, run databases migrations if necessary with bundle exec rake db:migrate, if necessary update the installed Ruby gems via bundle update, and then restart the Rails application server with touch tmp/restart.txt.
• on remote installations (e.g. using AWS) use the Capistrano deployment automation tool.

Deployment via Capistrano

Capistrano greatly simplifies the code updates via git, database migrations and server restarts on a remote machine. Capistrano assumes that the server has been provisioned using Vagrant/Chef or via manual installation (see Installation). Capistrano runs on your local machine.

To use Capistrano you need Ruby (at least 1.9.3) installed on your local machine. If you haven't done so, install Bundler to manage the dependencies for Lagotto:

gem install bundler

Then go to the Lagotto git repo that you probably have already cloned in the installation step and install all required dependencies.

git clone git://github.com/lagotto/lagotto.git
cd lagotto
bundle install

Edit deployment configuration

Edit the deployment configuration for a production server in the .env file in the local Lagotto root folder. The samae file needs to go to /var/www/lagotto/shared/.env on the production server.

Deploy

We deploy Lagotto with

bundle exec cap production deploy

You can replace production with other environments, e.g. staging. You can pass in environment variables, e.g. to deploy a different git branch: cap production deploy BRANCH_NAME=develop, or to deploy using a different .env file: DOTENV=example cap production deploy.

The first time this command is run it creates the folder structure required by Capistrano, by default in /var/www/lagotto. To make sure the expected folder structure is created successfully you can run:

bundle exec cap production deploy:check

On subsequent runs the command will pull the latest code from the Github repo, run database migrations, install the dependencies via Bundler, stop and start the background workers, updates the crontab file for Lagotto, and precompiles assets (CSS, Javascripts, images).