April 27, 2011

Keeping track of deploys: Make an about.txt with Capistrano

I wrote this for an app couple years ago and needed it agian – so I went and dug it up. I am certinan could be done in a more elegent way, but this works well and gives the information I needed about each deploy. Plus I know that both PM and QA folks understand how this works with very minimal guidence. Makes triaging issues go much smoother.

namespace :deploy do
  desc "Create about and revision files."
  task :after_update_code, :roles => :app do
    run "echo \"Version Info\" > #{release_path}/public/about.txt"
    run "echo \"============\" >> #{release_path}/public/about.txt"
    run "echo \"Version: `cat #{release_path}/VERSION`\" >> #{release_path}/public/about.txt"
    run "echo \"Deploy Date: `date`\" >> #{release_path}/public/about.txt"
    run "cd #{release_path} && echo \"Ref: `git rev-parse --short HEAD`\" >> #{release_path}/public/about.txt"
    run "echo \"Branch: #{revision}\" >> #{release_path}/public/about.txt"
    run "echo \"Installer Info: see /download/about.txt\" >> #{release_path}/public/about.txt"
    run "echo \"#{revision}\" > #{release_path}/public/revision.txt"
  end
end

You can find the gist up on github.



🚀