Capistrano is great for deploying Rails applications, but what about all the prerequisites, like Nginx and PostgreSQL? Do you have a firewall configured on your VPS? Have you installed the latest OS security updates? Is HTTPS working right?

The capistrano-fiftyfive gem adds a cap <stage> provision task to Capistrano that takes care of all that. Out of the box, provision will:

• Install the latest postgresql, node.js, and nginx apt packages
• Install all libraries needed to build Ruby
• Lock down your VPS using ufw (a simple front-end to iptables)
• Set up logrotated for your Rails logs
• Schedule an automatic daily backup of your Rails database
• Generate a self-signed SSL certificate if you need one
• Set up ngnix with the latest SSL practices and integrate it with Unicorn for your Rails app
• Create the deployer user and install an SSH public key
• Install rbenv and use ruby-build to compile the version of Ruby required by your app (by inspecting your .ruby-version file)
• And more!

The gem is named "capistrano-fiftyfive" because it is built first and foremost for serving our deployment needs here at 55 Minutes. You'll notice that capistrano-fiftyfive is opinionated and strictly uses the following stack:

• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
• PostgreSQL
• Unicorn
• Nginx
• rbenv
• dotenv

Not quite to your liking? Consider forking the project to meet your needs.

Please note that this project requires Capistrano 3.x, which is a complete rewrite of Capistrano 2.x. The two major versions are not compatible.

Add these gems to the development group of your Rails application's Gemfile:

group :development do
  gem 'capistrano-bundler', :require => false
  gem 'capistrano-rails', :require => false
  gem 'capistrano', '~> 3.1.0', :require => false
  gem 'capistrano-fiftyfive', :require => false, :github => '55minutes/capistrano-fiftyfive', :branch => :master
end

And then execute:

$ bundle

If your project doesn't yet have a Capfile, run cap install with the list of desired stages (environments):

cap install STAGES=staging,production

Add these lines to the bottom of your app's Capfile (order is important!):

require 'capistrano/bundler'
require 'capistrano/rails'
require 'capistrano/fiftyfive'

Most of the capistrano-fiftyfive recipes are designed to run automatically as part of cap <stage> provision, for installing and setting up various bits of the Rails infrastructure, like nginx, unicorn, and postgres. Some recipes also contribute to the cap <stage> deploy process.

This auto-run behavior is fully under your control. In your deploy.rb, set :fiftyfive_recipes to an array of the desired recipes. If you don't want a recipe to execute as part of deploy/provision, simply omit it from the list.

The following list will suffice for most out-of-the-box Rails apps. The order of the list is not important.

set :fiftyfive_recipes, %w(
  aptitude
  crontab
  dotenv
  logrotate
  migrate
  nginx
  postgresql
  rbenv
  seed
  ssl
  ufw
  unicorn
  user
  version
)

Even if you don't include a recipe in the auto-run list, you can still invoke the tasks of those recipes manually at your discretion.

Many of the recipes have default settings that can be overridden. Use your deploy.rb file to specify these overrides. Or, you can override per stage. Here is an example override:

set :fiftyfive_unicorn_workers, 8

For the full list of settings and their default values, refer to defaults.rake.

Check out our rails-starter project for a sample Capfile and deploy.rb.

The power of the capistrano-fiftyfive recipes is that they take care of the entire setup of a bare Ubuntu 12.04 server, all the way to a fully configured and running Rails app on top up Unicorn, Nginx, rbenv, and PostgreSQL.

These steps assume you have loaded the full set of capistrano-fiftyfive recipes in your Capfile.

1. Provision an Ubuntu 12.04 VPS at your hosting provider of choice.

2. Install your public SSH key for the root user. Some providers (e.g. DigitalOcean) can do this for you automatically when you provision a new VPS.

3. Repeat steps 1-2 for all the servers in your cluster, if you are using a multi-server setup (e.g. separate web, app, and database servers).

4. Let capistrano-fiftyfive take it from here:

    cap staging provision
    cap staging deploy
   

For a full description of all available tasks, run:

cap -T

All tasks from capistrano-fiftyfive will be prefixed with fiftyfive:. You can run these tasks just like any other capistrano task, like so:

cap staging fiftyfive:seed

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request