blakey - simple git/systemd based deployment

Caveat

This is a new package (2017-02-15) which directly manipulates systemd, caution appropriate.

Introduction

blakey is installed on machines that are deployment targets. It manages bare git repositories; if stuff is pushed to one of these repositories, it is automatically checked out and the services that reference it are restarted. Only systemd is supported so far.

Setup

Either clone this repo and install, or, to install from npm run (as root) on each machine you intend to deploy to:

npm install -g blakey

You should probably create a directory to keep deployments in:

mkdir /var/local/blakey

Tests

npm test runs the unit tests. There's also some vagrant-based system tests: npm run test:sys.

Use

Let's say we want to deploy a project called butler.

Create a directory to hold the deployment:

mkdir /var/local/blakey/butler

Initialise it:

cd /var/local/blakey/butler
blakey init

This will create subdirectories so:

/var/local/blakey/butler/
  repo.git/
  versions/

repo.git is the bare repo; each push creates a new directory under versions, and after the first push, there will be a symlink current which points to the most recent version. The code will be checked-out into a subdirectory called work.

The repo created is --shared=group and the user on the deployment machine that is receiving the push should be in that group. Also that user should be able to do sudo systemctl.

Setup code will be run automatically, based on discovery of files:

filename command

package.json npm install Makefile make install setup.py python setup.py build

Note that these build procedures should leave the code ready to run, but shouldn't write outside of the deployment directory, /var/local/blakey/butler/current in this example.

When some code has been pushed and the automatic build performed (will happen synchronously with the git push), you can enable and start whatever systemd services there are:

systemctl enable /var/local/blakey/butler/current/work/butler.service
systemctl start butler.service

Don't make a symlink from /etc/systemd/system, this doesn't work. That's by design, and the error message is "no such file or directory".