Has anyone tried Webistrano?

Question

I am looking for a remote deployment strategy for the projects I'm working on, and have even gone so far as to start development from scratch.

But I came across an almost identical implementation called Webistrano. Has anyone tried to use it to deploy a project, is anyone still using it? Is this good, or does it make you want to hit yourself in the eyes with a dull pencil?

Answer 1

My webdev company uses it for dozens of PHP projects on different production servers. We are very pleased with this!

Webistrano is a web GUI for capistrano. The reason we chose it directly above the launch of Capistrano is because it provides a good centralized interface. Most of our developers are not very experienced CLIs, and I don’t think they really should be. Instead of distributing the capistrano recipe everywhere, we opted for a web application approach.

Webistrano keeps every deployment log and username, so we have some accountability. It provides a central place to see which version of the project is currently in live mode. Several administrators have the ability to create recipes for Webistrano, and the Webistrano GUI can be obtained by all developers on our intranet. They only need to select the project and stage (for example, Dev or Prod) and click deploy.

This significantly reduced the likelihood that everything would go wrong, and it turned out to be ideal for us.

Some functions that I skip:

• User Privileges : More limited user privileges than Admin and User. We would be pleased to limit certain actions or projects to specific users.
• Interactive prompts : Webistrano cannot request input if the capistrano process requires it during deployment. You can have a web server request variables before deployment, but not during deployment, say if some unexpected issue pops up.
• Centralized authentication . Well, to be honest, it supports .htaccess authentication, so we should probably configure PAM to check with LDAP.

This is open-source, so I should probably take a look at the implementation of some of them. I just want me to be better at Ruby on Rails.

Answer 2

Regarding the lack of user privileges in Webistrano, you can try the Webistrano Privilege plugin: https://github.com/espace/webistrano_privileges/

"Privileges Webistrano is a Rails plugin for web administrator 1.3 to provide user access control to projects. It will provide and organize user access to projects and grant them privileges to deploy a project to which they have access only."

Answer 3

Assuming you are deploying a * nix server ...

Why not just use capistrano, for which webistrano is just a wrapper? It can be configured to deploy almost anything. (Capistrano makes it easy to use ssh through ruby.)

If you do not deploy rails, you will probably end up writing your own scripts, which, if you have any problems with system administration, should not be difficult. The capistrano project documentation sucks, but there are a lot of people who figured this out, and once you start deploying the script, you should be good.