Jack the Shipper

Shipper is a continuous deployment tool that leverages GitHub's Deployments API to allow secure asynchronous deployments.

How does it work?

A shipper daemon polls the Github Deployments API for new deployments on a given environment. When a new deployment is found it follows these steps:

• Creates a "pending" Github Deployment Status
• Checks out the code into a "versioned" folder
• Runs the "Before Symlink" steps
• Creates a symbolic link called current to the new check out
• Runs the "After Symlink" steps
• Creates a "success" Github Deployment Status

Here is a diagram of how the whole system might look like:

Configuration

A configuration file is required to set up shipper. It uses the YAML format and it should contain the following parameters:

• git_url: The url of the Github repository
• environment: The environment the daemon should check for new deployments
• app_path: Path of the application
• server_id: A unique ID for the server
• before_symlink: Array of commands to run before the symlink
• after_symlink: Array of commands to run after the symlink
• shared_files: A list of shared files to be symlinked
• keep_revisions: Revisions to keep when getting ones
• interval: Interval between API checks in seconds

A GH_KEY environment variable with a Github Oauth Token is currently required to run shipper. This requirement will be removed for the monitor.

Commands

Setup

Setup the folder structure within the app_path. It creates a releases and a shared folder.

shipper setup -c shipper.yml

New

Crease a new deployment in the Github API. A ref is required.

shipper new -c shipper.yml --ref master

Run

Run the process that continuously monitors for new deployments.

shipper run -c shipper.yml

Deploy

Run a manual deployment, if it exists.

shipper deploy -c shipper.yml