Baptize

Baptize is an extension for Capistrano, that allows for server provisioning. The API resembles Sprinkle, but the underlying implementation is quite different. Where Sprinkle tries to compile a static payload of commands and push to the server, Baptize is executed in runtime. It also reuses much more of Capistrano, than Sprinkle does. Basically, each Baptize package is a capistrano task - Baptize just adds some helpers and fancy dsl on top, to make it look declarative.

Be warned that Baptize is less than a week old at the time of this writing, and it has no test coverage - so it's probably riddled with bugs. That said, I do eat my own dog food, so it's at least somewhat functional.

Setup

At some point, I'll probably wrap this procedure in a generator, but for now you'll have to do so manually.

To get started, create a Gemfile:

source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'capistrano', '~> 2.15'
gem 'baptize'

And a Capfile:

require 'bundler'
require 'capistrano'
require 'baptize'
load_configuration :roles
Dir.glob("#{capistrano_path}/packages/**/*.rb").each do |package|
  load(package)
end
Dir.glob("#{capistrano_path}/recipes/**/*.rb").each do |recipe|
  load(recipe)
end

And a couple of folders and files:

./capistrano/
./capistrano/config/
./capistrano/config/roles.rb               # Globally applied configuration. Define roles here.
./capistrano/config/baptize.rb             # Contains config files used by baptize packages. Define policies here.
./capistrano/packages/                     # Put package definitions in here.
./capistrano/recipes/                      # Put regular capistrano tasks in here.
./capistrano/assets/                       # Place auxiliary files here.

And Finally, run the following command:

bundle

Sample configuration

First define some roles, by opening up config/roles.rb - This is just regular Capistrano stuff. For example:

role :server, "192.168.1.1"

Next define a policy for the server. Open up config/baptize.rb and put this:

policy :server do
  requires :system_update
end

This defines that the role :server needs a package system_update.

You probably should define which login credentials to use as well:

# ssh login user
set :user, 'ubuntu'
# ssh key location
ssh_options[:keys] = '~/.ssh/aws-key.pem'
# run commands through sudo
set :use_sudo, true

Note that since this is defined inside config/baptize.rb, it won't apply to capistrano recipes outside of baptize. The roles, on the other hand, is globally loaded (That happens in the Capfile).

Better create that packages then. Open up packages/system_update.rb:

package :system_update do
  description "System Update"
  install do
    run 'apt-get update -y'
    run 'apt-get upgrade -y'
  end
end

This defines a package, that will upgrade the apt package manager of the target system.

Deploying policies

You can now run the following command:

cap baptize

Which should make capistrano ssh in to the :server role and try to update apt. It'll probably fail, unless you actually have a server running at that IP.

If you want to just configure a single role, you can do so by running:

cap baptize:policies:server

Using Baptize alongside Capistrano

If you also want to use Capistrano for regular application deployment (what it's actually ment for), you might want to create a file in config/deploy.rb to hold settings for this. E.g.:

set :application, "set your application name here"
set :repository,  "set your repository location here"

And to make sure it is loaded, modify your Capfile to include:

load 'deploy'
load 'deploy/assets' # For using Rails' asset pipeline
before 'deploy' do
  load_configuration :deploy
end

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TODO: There is more to Baptize, but that'll have to wait for now.