Webistrano 1.3 released

Posted by Jonathan

I'm proud to announce Webistrano 1.3!

Webistrano is a Web UI for managing Capistrano deployments. It lets you manage projects and their stages like test, production, and staging with different settings. Those stages can then be deployed with Capistrano through Webistrano.

The 1.3 adds several new shiny features to Webistrano that make deployment easier:

  • Better Git support through Capistrano 2.2
  • Support for Phusion Passenger / mod_rails
  • Ability to temporary disable hosts for a deployment
  • A command-line interface with script/deploy
  • A simple permission system

The complete changelog is available through the Webistrano project site.

One very often demanded feature is the ability to temporary disable a host for a deployment. This is helpful when you want to deploy a stage without changing the stage configuration even if one or more hosts are down:

Another scenario is when you want to execute a task only on a limited set of servers.

The script/deploy command is a nice little gem, especially useful if you want to script Webistrano: 

$ ruby script/deploy 
Usage: deploy [options] project stage
    -h, --help                       This message
    -e, --environment=ENV            RAILS_ENV for Webistrano (default: production)
    -u, --username=NAME              Webistrano username to use (default: admin)
    -t, --task=NAME                  Capistrano task to invoke (default: deploy)
    -d, --description=TEXT           Deployment comment for Webistrano records

Further, Webistrano now offers built-in tasks for managing mod_rails deployments. It will override the default deploy tasks and ask for the necessary configuration entries so that using mod_rails becomes even easier.

Upgrading from previous releases is very easy, see the Upgrading wiki page.

Webistrano 1.3 can be downloaded here. Webistrano is BSD-licensed and the project site is open for everybody. Please see the project page for more documentation and screenshots. There are even some screencasts.

Comments

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  1. Ben Hill – April 30, 2008 @ 03:22 AM

    Excellent Project!

    Say, don’t know if you have ever tried to use github as a repository. I seem to be hung up on passing my ssh public key for authentication.

    Normally, I would use: set :ssh_options, { :forward_agent => true }

    ...but this doesn’t seem to work in webistrano.

    In any case, this is the only thing keeping us from adopting your great work!

    Thanks again!

    Ben

  2. Jonathan – April 30, 2008 @ 06:54 AM

    @Ben:

    Are you settings the :ssh_keys variable?

    How does the exported Capfile look like? (you can export a Capfile on a stage page)

  3. Larry – May 05, 2008 @ 11:20 AM

    This is what it says on your main site:

    “Currently the deployment part of Webistrano does not run on Windows.”

    Any idea when that feature will be available for Windows?

    Also, I’m not familiar with your product. Does the deployment part constitute a large portion of the program? In your opinion, is it currently worth using on a Windows platform or should us Windoz types wait awhile?

    Thanks, Larry

  4. Jonathan – May 05, 2008 @ 03:13 PM

    @Larry:

    Currently Webistrano will work fine on Windows until you try to deploy something :-)

    Webistrano shells out a background-process and this does not work on windows. The next version will fix this.

    Webistrano typically sits on a Linux-Box, like trac or svn.

  5. Rafael – May 07, 2008 @ 06:00 PM

    Hi Jonathan,

    I just installed webistrano and I came to the conclusion wonderful :-) Just what we needed.

    Only one question is remaining:

    When we run webistrano with mongrel, everything works fine. But running webistrano on mod_rails, when deploying, nothing reacts.

    Do you have a clue on this?

    Thank you, Rafael

  6. Jonathan – May 07, 2008 @ 09:02 PM

    @Rafael:

    I don’t run Webistrano on mod_rails, so I haven’t experienced this. Are you using prefork Apache or worker?

    I’ll try to reproduce this.