Why a Staging Environment? ¶

I arrived to a point where I couldn’t deploy anymore without having a staging environment before. Why? Because there are too many differences between my development and production environment like SSL implementation, precompiled Assets, Http & Rails servers are differents too and also because sometime you need to test your deployment script. Most of the time you can’t handle those during your tests. This is why you need a pre-production stage.
This is the way I do it. Maybe not the best but at least it works fine. For this deployment I use the gems ‘capistrano’ and ‘capistrano-ext’ (for the multistage support)

Setup a staging server ¶

The first step is to have a pre-production server (in my case, it will be another Virtual machine on my computer running a fresh ubuntu with a copy of my real production server libraries). It is important to match as much as possible the production server (however, if you can’t easily copy the configuration of your production, it’s ok if there are some differences). Make sure you have at least of the libraries you need for your project and the deployment (if there are some missing, you’ll notice it and solve it after you first deployments)

Prepare rails staging environment ¶

Because Staging is not Production you need to set a different environment environments/staging.rb. If you can make it a copy of the production.rb it is the best. Now we have to create a deploy folder in which we gonna add the environment specific deployment files.

production.rb

server 'www.myprodserver.com', :app, :web, :db, :primary => true
set :domain, "myprodserver.com"
set :rails_env, "production"
set :backup_server, "backup.mybackupserver.com"

staging.rb

server 'stagserver', :app, :web, :db, :primary => true  #you can use ip address
set :domain, "stageserver.com" #I configured my hosts to match the good ip
set :rails_env, "staging"
set :backup_server, "192.168.1.4"

and configure the deploy.rb

set :stages,                %w(production staging)
set :default_stage,         "staging"
set :capistrano_extensions, [:multistage, :git, :mysql, :rails, :unicorn, :servers]

$:.unshift(File.expand_path('./lib', ENV['rvm_path'])) # Add RVM's lib directory to the load path.
require "rvm/capistrano"                                # Load RVM's capistrano plugin.
require "bundler/capistrano"
require "whenever/capistrano"
require 'capistrano/ext/multistage'
...

We also need to generate the nginx configuration for the staging and deployment (I like it to be generated like this I don’t have to configure the server independently)
Still inside the deploy.rb

namespace :nginx do
  desc "Generate nginx configuration"
  task :generate_site, :roles => :web, :except => { :no_release => true } do
    require 'erb'
    template = File.read(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), "deploy", "#{application}.nginx.conf.erb"))
    result = ERB.new(template).result(binding)
    put result, "#{current_path}/config/deploy/#{domain}", :mode => 0644
  end
end

It will generate my nginx configuration based on the erb file included in the deploy folder (I use nginx and Unicorn for my prod/staging)

upstream <%= application %> {
  server unix:/tmp/<%= application %>.socket fail_timeout=0;
}

server {
  listen          80;
  listen          443;
  server_name     <%= domain %> *.<%= domain %>;
  rewrite ^       http://www.<%= domain %>$request_uri? permanent;
 }

server {
  listen          80;
  server_name     www.<%= domain %>;
  root            <%= current_path %>/public;
  access_log      /var/log/nginx/<%= application %>_access.log;
  rewrite_log      on;

  location / {
    proxy_redirect     off;

    proxy_set_header   Host             $host;
    proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP        $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For  $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

    if (!-f $request_filename) {
      proxy_pass  http://<%= application %>;
      break;
    }

    client_max_body_size       10m;
    client_body_buffer_size    128k;

    proxy_connect_timeout      90;
    proxy_send_timeout         90;
    proxy_read_timeout         90;

    proxy_buffer_size          4k;
    proxy_buffers              4 32k;
    proxy_busy_buffers_size    64k;
    proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;
  }

}

server {
  listen          443 default ssl;
  server_name     www.<%= domain %>;
  root            <%= current_path %>/public;
  access_log      /var/log/nginx/<%= application %>_access_ssl.log;
  rewrite_log      on;
  
  ssl_certificate    /etc/nginx/keys/changeit_toyour_ownkey.crt;
  ssl_certificate_key    /etc/nginx/keys/changeit_toyour_ownkey.key;

  location / {
    proxy_redirect     off;

    proxy_set_header   Host             $host;
    proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP        $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For  $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header   X_FORWARDED_PROTO https;

    if (!-f $request_filename) {
      proxy_pass  http://<%= application %>;
      break;
    }

    client_max_body_size       10m;
    client_body_buffer_size    128k;

    proxy_connect_timeout      90;
    proxy_send_timeout         90;
    proxy_read_timeout         90;

    proxy_buffer_size          4k;
    proxy_buffers              4 32k;
    proxy_busy_buffers_size    64k;
    proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;
  }
}

Capistrano multistage will take care of reading the good environment file inside the config/deploy folder.
From now we have our production deploy.rb working also for staging… and to be safe, default deploy will deploy on the staging server.

Deploy it ¶

For staging:

cap deploy

For production:

cap production deploy

It is the configuration I actually use for my websites ( http://www.commemora.fr a french website about commemoration, http://www.kakimovies.com, another site about movies and http://japon.crystalin.fr for my personnal rails photoblog)

I hope it helped you.

As the Rails community might have noticed already Cucumber changed a little since the version 1.1.0. It is no longer including the web_steps.rb neither paths.rb. When I first conclusion was « What the hell is that? How am I gonna write some cool tests? » I then started to read his post and understood it.

At least he provides a simple example how cucumber tests should be written which made me write some of mine.From there I tried to follow the rules and rewrite my tests

  Scenario Outline: Visitor can create account
    Given the visitor "<name>" with email "<email>" and password "<password>"
    When he goes to the account creation page
    And fills the account form
    Then he should be in the database
    Then he should receive a notice containing ""
  Examples:
    | name              | email                   | password    |
    | Silvain Dupont    | silvain_dupont@net.com  | 123456      |

It is more readable than the *fill this with that*. It is doing the same tests as previously but is more readable. The description of the steps for this tests are (inside users_steps.rb)

User creation module ¶

module UserSteps
  def new_user(name, options = {})
    options = {
      :email => "#{name.parameterize}_email@test.com",
      :password => "#{name.parameterize}_password",
    }.merge options
    User.new(:name => name, :email => options[:email], :password => options[:password], :password_confirmation => options[:password])
  end

  def create_user(name, options = {})
    user = new_user(name,options)
    user.save!
    user
  end
end
World(UserSteps)

User Steps ¶

Given /^the visitor "([^"]*)" with email "([^"]*)" and password "([^"]*)"$/ do |name, email, password|
  @user = new_user(name, :email => email, :password => password)
end

Given /^the visitor "([^"]*)"$/ do |name|
  @user = new_user(name)
end

Given /^the user "([^"]*)" has an account$/ do |name|
  @user = create_user(name)
end

When /^he goes to the account creation page$/ do
  visit new_user_url
end

When /^fills the account form$/ do
  within("#new_user") do
    fill_in 'user_name', :with => @user.name
    fill_in 'user_email', :with => @user.email
    fill_in 'user_password', :with => @user.password
    fill_in 'user_password_confirmation', :with => @user.password
    find('input[type="submit"]').click
  end
end