Static Website: Configuration

Setup

If you have followed the instructions on the Setup pages then you are almost ready to go. In the following szenario we will deploy the output directory of a static site generator like Jekyll to our server.

Configuring deploy.rb

The deploy.rb is our global configuration. Everything inside can be overriden by stage-specific settings and tasks, i.e. deploy/dev.rb. Every variable we’re using can be read by fetch(:variable_name) within our configuration.

# the name of the application
set :application, 'my-first-website'

# This is the folder we're deploying on the server
set :copy_source,     './output'

# We can exclude files and directories we do not wish to deploy
set :copy_exclude, %w(
  .hidden
  **/.hidden
)

Configuring the dev stage

Lets say we just want to deploy the generated output to a VirtualBox server.

Open deploy/dev.rb and add the following settings:

server 'project.example', user: 'vagrant', roles: %w{web app}
set :deploy_to, "/var/www/#{fetch(:application)}"
set :keep_releases, 5

We fetch the :application variable we set in deploy.rb, so the application will deploy into /var/www/your-domain/.

We also set ´:keep_releases to 5. That ensures that Capistrano will keep the last 5 successful releases on the server.

Next Page: Deployment