Deploying symfony project with Capistrano

May 12th, 2008
As you may know Capistrano is a great tool "originally written to ease the pain of deploying Rails applications". If you are not familiar with it take a look at it's getting started guide. Even if Rails applications development is the primary way that people use Capistrano it can be used for a lot more than that.

Let me show you how you can use it for easy-and-with-no-pain deployment of symfony project.

First cd to your project and run (I assume that you have Capistrano installed allready) 



$ capify .
to capify your project . This will create two files - Capify and config/deploy.rb. We'll use the second one for our symfony related tasks.
So this is how the modifed deploy.rb file that I use to deploy my symfony projects looks like : 
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set :application, "mysfapp"
set :repository,  "http://path/to/the/version/control/repository"

# If you aren't deploying to /u/apps/#{application} on the target
# servers (which is the default), you can specify the actual location
# via the :deploy_to variable:
set :deploy_to, "/path/to/project/#{application}"

# If there's no access to the repository from the production server, deploy via uploading tarball to the server
#set :deploy_via, :copy

# If you aren't using Subversion to manage your source code, specify
# your SCM below:
# set :scm, :subversion

role :app, "codingspree.net"
role :web, "codingspree.net"
# role :db,  "your db-server here", :primary => true

set :user, "codingspree"

# path to php executable 
set :php, "/usr/local/php5/bin/php5"

# symfony application name (used for migrations)
set :sf_app, "frontend"

namespace (:deploy) do

  desc <<-DESC
    [internal] Overriding original task to fit to symfony project needs
  DESC
  task :finalize_update, :except => { :no_release => true } do
    run "chmod -R g+w #{latest_release}" if fetch(:group_writable, true)

    run <<-CMD
      rm -rf #{latest_release}/log &&
      ln -s #{shared_path}/log #{latest_release}/log
    CMD
    
    run <<-CMD
      rm -rf #{latest_release}/cache &&
      ln -s #{shared_path}/cache #{latest_release}/cache
    CMD
    
    stamp = Time.now.utc.strftime("%Y%m%d%H%M.%S")
    asset_paths = %w(images css js).map { |p| "#{latest_release}/web/#{p}" }.join(" ")
    run "find #{asset_paths} -exec touch -t #{stamp} {} ';'; true", :env => { "TZ" => "UTC" }
  end
  
  desc <<-DESC
    Overriding original task to exclude restart
  DESC
  task :default do
    update
  end
  
  desc <<-DESC
    Overriding original task to use symfoy migrations (via sfMigrationsLightPlugin)
  DESC
  task :migrations do
    update
    sf.migrate
  end  
  
  after "deploy:update", 'deploy:customize'
  
  desc <<-DESC
    All custom tasks will be here
  DESC
  task :customize do
    # custmize it here
    sf.symlinks
    sf.remove_dev_environments
    
    # clear cache
    sf.cc
  end
  
end


namespace (:sf) do
  
  desc <<-DESC
    Run the "symfony migrate" task
  DESC
  task :migrate do
    run "cd #{current_path} && #{php} symfony migrate #{sf_app}"    
  end

  desc <<-DESC
    Run the "symfony cc" task
  DESC
  task :cc do
    run "cd #{current_path} && rm -rf cache/*"
  end

  desc <<-DESC
    Create symlink to symfony specific targets
  DESC
  task :symlinks do
    # symlink to database.yml
    run "rm -rf #{current_path}/config/databases.yml"
    run "ln -s #{shared_path}/databases.yml #{current_path}/config/databases.yml"

    # symlink to config.php    
    run "rm -rf #{current_path}/config/config.php"
    run "ln -s #{shared_path}/config.php #{current_path}/config/config.php"

    # symlink to sf data dir    
    run "rm -rf #{current_path}/web/sf"
    run "ln -s /path/to/sf/data/dir #{current_path}/web/sf"
        
    # symlink to uploads    
    run "rm -rf #{current_path}/web/uploads"
    run "ln -s #{shared_path}/uploads #{current_path}/web/uploads"
    
  end 
  
  desc <<-DESC
    Remove DEV environments
  DESC
  task :remove_dev_environments do
    run "rm -rf #{current_path}/web/*_dev.php"    
  end 
  
  desc <<-DESC
    Disable symfony application
  DESC
  task :disable do
    run "cd #{current_path} && #{php} symfony disable #{sf_app} prod"    
  end 
  
  desc <<-DESC
    Enable symfony application
  DESC
  task :enable do
    run "cd #{current_path} && #{php} symfony enable #{sf_app} prod"    
  end   
end
As you can see most of it is usual Capistrano configuration (user, repository, application, etc.) so I'll explain only the symfony related stuff. 
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# path to php executable 
set :php, "/usr/local/php5/bin/php5"
This variable is used to specify where PHP5 cli is placed (you know not all hostings are using PHP5 as default). 
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# symfony application name (used for migrations)
set :sf_app, "frontend"
Here we specify the name of one of our symfony project applications. It will be needed to run migrations (you ARE using sfPropelMigrationsLightPlugin allready, right?).

In the next section of the deploy.rb file I overrided few of the original tasks from deploy namespace to fit to my needs - finalize_update to set symlinks to symfony cache and log directories, the default task to exclude restart because I don't need it, migrations to set it to use symfony migrations and at the end there is one hook task that will be executed after deploy:update -it's called customize and I'll place all custom tasks there.

The last part of the file is sf namespace that includes some symfony related tasks as migrate, cc, symlinks, remove_dev_environments, disable, enable and so on. As you see you can wrap any symfony task that you have to execute on the production server with Capistrano task.

All you need now is to set a little bit the production server (run cap deploy:config, symlink document root to /path/to/project/mysfapp/current, place relevant database.yml and config.php in /path/to/project/mysfapp/shared, etc) and you are ready to run 


$ cap deploy
Thats it! Easy one command deployment! With migrations (cap deploy:migrate)! Hope it's explained clear enough (if not place your questions in the comments).
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