__preface.mdown

Example of a Foreman/Capistrano/upstart setup

I need to jot down my Foreman-based web app setup real quick lest I forget.

When I build a Rails app (any web app, actually), it's not just the app itself anymore. There also are background jobs to be taken care of -- started, stopped, restarted. Usually these are required to run in production on a remote box, too, so I use Foreman to run those jobs. Foreman uses a Procfile to learn about said jobs, gives me a dead-simple way to start and stop them, and provides me with color-coded output when they run. It's a great timesaver.

Then, when I deploy my app to a remote machine, I use Foreman's ability to export upstart (or inittab) configurations. For that, I have custom tasks in my Capistrano-based config/deploy.rb file. Those halt the current jobs on the remote machine, trigger Foreman to write out new configurations for upstart and re-start the jobs. (Please note: Foreman needs to be installed on the remote box as well.)

Since it took me a while to get this setup working, I figured I'd share it real quick.

My examples come from a Rails-based environment, but I tried to make them app-agnostic as possible.

This here "article" is basically a bare-bone, stripped down version of Tim Riley's "Run Your Own Piece of Heroku with Foreman".

Assumptions

• The Foreman gem is installed both on the local dev machine and the remote box
• Deployment is done using Capistrano
• The remote machine is running Ubuntu
• The remote machine has upstart installed

deploy.rb

### Foreman-related snippet of `config/deploy.rb` below.
### Rest of the file omitted!

namespace :foreman do
  desc "Export the Procfile to Ubuntu's upstart scripts"
  task :export, :roles => :app do
    run "cd /var/my-ossum-app && sudo bundle exec foreman export upstart /etc/init -a my-ossum-app -u ossum-user -l /var/my-ossum-app/log"
  end
  
  desc "Start the application services"
  task :start, :roles => :app do
    sudo "start my-ossum-app"
  end

  desc "Stop the application services"
  task :stop, :roles => :app do
    sudo "stop my-ossum-app"
  end

  desc "Restart the application services"
  task :restart, :roles => :app do
    run "sudo start my-ossum-app || sudo restart my-ossum-app"
  end
end

after "deploy:update", "foreman:export"
after "deploy:update", "foreman:restart"

Procfile

worker:     QUEUE=* bundle exec rake environment resque:work 
scheduler:  bundle exec rake environment resque:scheduler