bootleg

v0.7.0

Bootleg

CircleCI Hex.pm Packagist

Simple deployment and server automation for Elixir.

Bootleg is a simple set of commands that attempt to simplify building and deploying Elixir applications. The goal of the project is to provide an extensible framework that can support many different deployment scenarios with one common set of commands.

Out of the box, Bootleg provides remote build and remote server automation for your Distillery releases. Bootleg assumes your project is committed into a git repository and some of the build steps use this assumption to handle code within the build process. If you are using another source control management (SCM) tool please consider contributing to Bootleg to add additional support.

Installation 

def deps do
  [{:distillery, "~> 1.5"},
   {:bootleg, "~> 0.7"}]
end

Build server setup

In order to build your project, Bootleg requires that your build server be set up to compile Elixir code. Make sure you have already installed Elixir on any build server you define.

Quick Start

Initialize your project

This step is optional but if run will create an example config/deploy.exs file that you can use as a starting point.

$ mix bootleg.init

Configure your release parameters 

# config/deploy.exs
use Bootleg.Config

role :build, "your-build-server.local", user: "develop", password: "bu1ldm3", workspace: "/some/build/workspace"
role :app, ["web1", "web2", "web3"], user: "admin", password: "d3pl0y", workspace: "/var/myapp"

build and deploy 

$ mix bootleg.build
$ mix bootleg.deploy
$ mix bootleg.start

also see: Phoenix support

Configuration

Create and configure Bootleg’s config/deploy.exs file:

# config/deploy.exs
use Bootleg.Config

role :build, "build.example.com", user, "build", port: 2222, workspace: "/tmp/build/myapp"
role :app, ["web1.example.com", "web2.myapp.com"], user: "admin", workspace: "/var/www/myapp"

Environments

Bootleg has its own concept of environments, which is analogous to but different from MIX_ENV. Bootleg environments are used if you have multiple clusters that you deploy your code to, such as a QA or staging cluster, in addition to your production cluster. Your main Bootleg config still goes in config/deploy.exs, and environment specific details goes in config/deploy/your_bootleg_env.exs. The selected environment config file gets loaded immediately after config/deploy.exs. To invoke a Bootleg command with a specific environment, simply pass it as the first argument to any bootleg Mix command.

For example, say you have both a production and a staging cluster. Your configuration might look like:

# config/deploy.exs
use Bootleg.Config

task :my_nifty_thing do
  Some.jazz()
end

after_task :deploy, :my_nifty_thing

role :build, "build.example.com", user, "build", port: 2222, workspace: "/tmp/build/myapp"
# config/deploy/production.exs
use Bootleg.Config

role :app, ["web1.example.com", "web2.example.com"], user: "admin", workspace: "/var/www/myapp"
# config/deploy/staging.exs
use Bootleg.Config

role :app, ["stage1.example.com", "stage2.example.com"], user: "admin", workspace: "/var/www/myapp"

Then if you wanted to update staging, you would mix bootleg.update staging. If you wanted to update production, it would be mix bootleg.update production, or just mix bootleg.update (the default environment is production).

It is not a requirement that you define an environment file for each environment, but you will get a warning if a specific environment file can’t be found. It is strongly encouraged to have an environment file per environment.

Roles

Actions in Bootleg are paired with roles, which are simply a collection of hosts that are responsible for the same function, for example building a release, archiving a release, or executing commands against a running application.

Role names are unique so there can only be one of each defined, but hosts can be grouped into one or more roles. Roles can be declared repeatedly to provide a different set of options to different sets of hosts.

By defining roles, you are defining responsibility groups to cross cut your host infrastructure. The build and app roles have inherent meaning to the default behavior of Bootleg, but you may also define more that you can later filter on when running commands inside a Bootleg hook. There is another built in role :all which will always include all hosts assigned to any role. :all is only available via remote/2.

Some features or extensions may require additional roles, for example if your release needs to run Ecto migrations, you will need to assign the :db role to one host.

Role and host options

Options are set on roles and on hosts based on the order in which the roles are defined. Some are used internally by Bootleg:

  • workspace - remote path specifying where to perform a build or push a deploy (default .)
  • user - ssh username (default to local user)
  • password - ssh password
  • identity - unencrypted private key file path (passphrases are not supported at this time)
  • port - ssh port (default 22)
  • replace_os_vars - controls the REPLACE_OS_VARS environment variable used by Distillery for release configuration (default true)

Examples

role :app, ["host1", "host2"], user: "deploy", identity: "/home/deploy/.ssh/deploy_key.priv"
role :app, ["host2"], port: 2222

In this example, two hosts are declared for the app role, both as the user deploy but only host2 will use the non-default port of 2222.

role :db, ["db.example.com", "db2.example.com"], user: "datadog"
role :db, "db.example.com", primary: true

In this example, two hosts are declared for the db role but the first will receive a host-specific option for being the primary. Host options can be arbitrarily named and targeted by tasks.

role :balancer, ["lb1.example.com", "lb2.example.com"], banana: "boat"
role :balancer, "lb3.example.com"

In this example, two load balancers are configured with a host-specific option of banana. The balancer role itself also receives the role-specific option of banana. A third balancer is then configured without any specific host options.

SSH options

If you include any common :ssh.connect options they will not be included in role or host options and will only be used when establishing SSH connections (exception: user is always passed to role and hosts due to its relevance to source code management).

Supported SSH options include:

  • user
  • port
  • timeout
  • recv_timeout

Refer to Bootleg.SSH.supported_options/0 for the complete list of supported options, and :ssh.connect for more information.

Role restrictions

Bootleg extensions may impose restrictions on certain roles, such as restricting them to a certain number of hosts. See the extension documentation for more information.

Roles provided by Bootleg

  • build - Takes only one host. If a list is given, only the first hosts is used and a warning may result.
  • app - Takes a list of hosts, or a string with one host.

Building and deploying a release 

mix bootleg.build production
mix bootleg.deploy production
mix bootleg.start production

Alternatively the above commands can be rolled into one with:

mix bootleg.update production

Note that bootleg.update will stop any running nodes and then perform a cold start. The stop is performed with the task stop_silent, which differs from stop in that it does not fail if the node is already stopped.

bootleg.build will clean the remote workspace prior to copying the code over, to ensure that any files left from a previous build do not cause issues. The entire contents of the remote workspace are removed via rm -rf * from the root of the workspace. You can configure this behavior by setting the config option clean_locations, which takes a list of locations and passes them to rm -rf on the remote server. Relative paths will be interpreted relative to the workspace, absolute paths will be treated as is. Warning: this means that config :clean_locations, ["/"] would attempt to erase the entire root file system of your remote server. Be careful when altering clean_locations and never use a privileged user on your build server.

Admin Commands

Bootleg has a set of commands to check up on your running nodes:

mix bootleg.restart production  # Restarts a deployed release.
mix bootleg.start production      # Starts a deployed release.
mix bootleg.stop production      # Stops a deployed release.
mix bootleg.ping production      # Check status of running nodes

Other Comamnds

Bootleg has a few utility commands to help streamline its usage:

mix bootleg.init             # Initializes a project for use with Bootleg
mix bootleg.invoke <task>    # Calls an arbitrary Bootleg task

Hooks

Hooks may be defined by the user in order to perform additional (or exceptional) operations before or after certain actions performed by Bootleg.

Hooks are defined within config/deploy.exs. Hooks may be defined to trigger before or after a task. The following tasks are provided by Bootleg:

Build Tasks

  • build - build process for creating a release package

    • init - sets up a bare repository for pushing code to
    • clean - cleans the remote workspace
    • push_remote - pushes code to build server
    • reset_remote - checks out the branch specified by refspec option (defaults to master)
    • compile - compilation of your project
    • generate_release - generation of the release package
    • download_release - pulls down the release archive

Deployment Tasks

  • deploy - deploy of a release package

    • upload_release
    • unpack_release

Build and Deploy

  • update

    • build
    • deploy
    • stop_silent
    • start

Management tasks

  • start - starting of a release
  • stop - stopping of a release
  • restart - restarting of a release
  • ping - check connectivity to a deployed app

Hooks can be defined for any task (built-in or user defined), even ones that do not exist. This can be used to create an “event” that you want to respond to, but has no real “implementation”.

To register a hook, use:

  • before_task <:task> do ... end - Before task executes, execute the provided code block.
  • after_task <:task> do ... end - After task executes, execute the provided code block.

For example:

use Bootleg.Config

before_task :build do
  IO.puts "Starting build..."
end

after_task :deploy do
  MyAPM.notify_deploy()
end

You can define multiple hooks for a task, and they will be executed in the order they are defined. For example:

use Bootleg.Config

before_task :start do
  IO.puts "This may take a bit"
end

after_task :start do
  IO.puts "Started app!"
end

before_task :start do
  IO.puts "Starting app!"
end

would result in:

$ mix bootleg.build
This may take a bit
Starting app!
...
Started app!
$

invoke and task

There are a few ways for custom code to be executed during the Bootleg life cycle. Before showing some examples, here’s a quick glossary of the related pieces.

  • task <:identifier> do ... end - Assign a block of code to the atom provided as :identifier. This can then be executed by using the invoke macro.
  • invoke <:identifier> - Execute the task code blocked identified by :identifier, as well as any before/after hooks.

NOTE: Invoking an undefined task is not an error and any registered hooks will still be executed.

use Bootleg.Config

before_task :build do
  IO.puts "Hello"
  invoke :custom_event
end

task :custom_task do
  IO.puts "World"
end

after_task :custom_event do
  IO.puts "Elixir"
  invoke :custom_task
end

A shortened before/after syntax can be used to simply invoke a task directly from an event.

task :clear_cache do
  {:ok, _} = remote do
    "rm -rf /tmp/cache"
  end
end

before_task :restart, do: :clear_cache

Alternatively:

before_task :restart do
  {:ok, _output} = remote do
    "rm -rf /tmp/cache"
  end
end

remote

The workhorse of the Bootleg DSL is remote: it executes shell commands on remote servers and returns the results. It takes a role and a block of commands to execute. The commands are executed on all servers belonging to the role, and raises an SSHError if an error is encountered. Optionally, a list of options can be provided to filter the hosts where the commands are run.

use Bootleg.Config

# basic
remote :app do
  "echo hello"
end

# multi line
remote :app do
  "touch ~/file.txt"
  "rm file.txt"
end

# getting the result
[{:ok, [stdout: output], _, _}] = remote :app do
  "ls -la"
end

# raises an SSHError
remote :app do
  "false"
end

# filtering - only runs on app hosts with an option of primary set to true
remote :app, filter: [primary: true] do
  "mix ecto.migrate"
end

# change working directory - creates a file `/tmp/foo`, regardless of the role
# workspace configuration
remote :app, cd: "/tmp" do
  "touch ./foo"
end

Phoenix Support

If your application has extra steps required, you may make use of the hooks system to add additional functionality. A common case is for building assets for Phoenix applications.

Using the bootleg_phoenix package

To run these steps automatically you may include the additional package bootleg_phoenix in your deps list. This package provides the build hook commands required to build most Phoenix releases.

# mix.exs
def deps do
  [{:distillery, "~> 1.5"},
  {:bootleg, "~> 0.6"},
  {:bootleg_phoenix, "~> 0.2"}]
end

See also: labzero/bootleg_phoenix.

Using your own deploy configuration and hooks

Similar to how bootleg_phoenix is implemented, you can make use of the hooks system to run some commands on the build server around compile time.

task :phx_digest do
  remote :build do
    "npm install"
    "./node_modules/brunch/bin/brunch b -p"
    "MIX_ENV=prod mix phx.digest"
  end
end

after_task :compile, :phx_digest

Task Providers

Sharing is a good thing. Bootleg supports loading tasks from packages in a manner very similar to Mix.Task.

You can create and share custom tasks by namespacing a module under Bootleg.Tasks and passing a block of Bootleg DSL:

defmodule Bootleg.Tasks.Foo do
  use Bootleg.Task do
    task :foo do
      IO.puts "Foo!!"
    end

    before_task :build, :foo
  end
end

In order to be found and loaded by Bootleg, external tasks need to be located within a Mix.Project dependency.

See also: Bootleg.Task for additional examples.

Help

For detailed information about the Bootleg commands and their options, try mix bootleg help <command>.

We’re usually around on Slack where you can find us on elixir-lang’s #bootleg channel if you have any questions.

Acknowledgments

Bootleg makes heavy use of the bitcrowd/SSHKit.ex library under the hood. We are very appreciative of the efforts of the bitcrowd team for both creating SSHKit.ex and being so attentive to our requests. We’re also grateful for the opportunity to collaborate on ideas for both projects!

Contributing

We welcome all contributions to Bootleg, whether they’re improving the documentation, implementing features, reporting issues or suggesting new features.

If you’d like to contribute documentation, please check the best practices for writing documentation.

LICENSE

Bootleg source code is released under the MIT License. Check the LICENSE file for more information.