boss

Yet another pythonic deployment tool built on top of paramiko and fabric.

Deploy like a boss.

Installation

$ pip install boss-cli==1.0.3

Configuration

Check the configuration page.

Custom Scripts

Custom scripts are scripts/commands that could be defined directly in the config file without having to write any line of python in the fabfile.py. They're similar to the npm scripts, if you're familiar with them.

You can define the custom scripts under the scripts field in the boss.yml.

For instance:

# boss.yml
stages:
  prod:
    host: your-server.com
    public_url: 'https://your-server.com'
    branch: master

scripts:
  hello: 'echo "Hello World!"'
  build: npm run build
  logs: pm2 logs

Boss comes out of the box with a task run which you can use to run these scripts on the remote server like this:

$ fab prod run:hello
$ fab prod run:build
$ fab prod run:logs

Deployment

1. Remote Source Deployment

This is a generic deployment preset, where the remote host also contains the project source code and the git repository. The deploy task would synchronize the remote with the latest changes of the provided branch from the origin. It then builds the project and restarts the service if needed.

This is general and language agnostic so it can be used for deploying any kind of project. You just need to specify the relevant build script to build your project in the remote and if it requires service restart then you'll need to define a reload script as well.

You'll need to set the deployment preset as remote-source in your configuration.

deployment:
  preset: remote-source

Configuration

Your boss.yml file for remote source deployment would look similar to this:

project_name: my-app
project_description: 'My App'
repository_url: 'https://github.com/username/repository'
branch_url: '{repository_url}/tree/{branch}'
user: deploy_user

deployment:
  preset: remote-source
  base_dir: /source/my-app

stages:
  prod:
    host: your-server.com
    public_url: 'https://your-server.com'
    branch: master

scripts:
  install: 'npm install'
  build: 'npm run build'
  start: 'pm2 start dist/myapp.js'
  stop: 'pm2 stop dist/myapp.js'
  reload: 'pm2 reload dist/myapp.js'

notifications:
  slack:
    enabled: true
    endpoint: ${BOSS_SLACK_ENDPOINT}

The above configuration is specific to a Node.js project environment, but you can also deploy projects built with other languages like PHP, Python, Java etc. All you need to do is change the scripts install, build, reload.

Available tasks

You can check the available tasks for remote-source preset with fab --list.

 ➜ fab --list

Available commands:

    build    Build the application.
    check    Check the current remote branch and the last commit.
    deploy   Deploy to remote source.
    prod     Configures the prod server environment.
    logs     Tail the logs.
    restart  Restart the service.
    run      Run a custom script.
    status   Check the status of the service.
    stop     Stop the service.
    sync     Sync the changes on the branch with the remote (origin).

Deploy

Now to deploy the the application to the prod server that you've configured in the stages above. You can do:

 ➜ fab prod deploy

This would deploy the default branch master in this case. You can also provide a specific branch to deploy, as follows:

 ➜ fab prod deploy:branch=my-branch

2. Web Deployment

This deployment is useful for deploying the web apps (React, Angular, Vue etc) or static files to the remote server. This preset assumes the static files are served via a web server on the remote host eg: nginx, apache etc. Here, the source code is built locally and only the dist or build is uploaded and deployed to the server.

The deployment process is zero-downtime, just like capistrano.

You'll need to set the deployment preset as web in your configuration.

deployment:
  preset: web

Configuration

Your boss.yml file for web deployment would look similar to this:

project_name: my-app
project_description: 'My App'
repository_url: 'https://github.com/username/repository'
branch_url: '{repository_url}/tree/{branch}'
user: deploy_user

deployment:
  preset: web
  build_dir: build/           # The local build directory
  base_dir: /app/deployment   # The remote base directory for deployment.

stages:
  prod:
    host: your-server.com
    public_url: 'https://your-server.com'

scripts:
  install: 'npm install'
  build: 'npm run build'

notifications:
  slack:
    enabled: true
    endpoint: ${BOSS_SLACK_ENDPOINT}

The above configuration would work for any kind of web projects as long as it generates the build in static files (HTML, CSS, JS, media) that could be served via a web server.

You can define two scripts install and build in your boss.yml, to install project dependencies and build the source respectively. For instance: if you've created your application using create-react-app, you can set these to npm install and npm run build as shown in above config.

You also have to set the location of the output directory for the build script as deployment.build_dir. In our case, this would be the build/ directory.

Available Tasks

You can check the available tasks for this preset with fab --list.

 ➜ fab --list

Available commands:

    build      Build the code locally.
    buildinfo  Print the build information.
    builds     Display the build history.
    deploy     Zero-Downtime deployment for the web.
    info       Print the build information.
    logs       Tail the logs.
    rollback   Zero-Downtime deployment rollback for the web.
    run        Run a custom script.
    setup      Setup remote host for deployment.
    prod       Configures the prod server environment.

Remote Setup

For the first time, you can configure the remote host for deployment using the setup task.

 ➜ fab prod setup

This will create necessary files and directories on the remote under the provided base_dir path. In our case the base directory will be /app/deployment.

Once, the setup task completes you should see a message like this:

Remote is setup and is ready for deployment.

Deployed build will point to /app/deployment/current.
For serving the latest build, please set your web server document root to /app/deployment/current.

Now you'll need to set your web server document root on the remote host to the current symlink created under the base_dir path. This symlink will point to the latest build when you deploy your app.

Web Server Config

If you're using a web server like nginx, you can set the document root like this:

# Sample nginx Configuration.
server {
  listen 80;
  listen [::]:80;

  # This is the symlink that points to the build that is deployed.
  root /app/deployment/current;

  index index.html;
  ...
}

Deploy

You can use the deploy task to deploy the app to the remote server.

Here, first the deploy task would trigger the install and build scripts to build the project locally, after which the built directory configured in deployment.build_dir would be tar-zipped and uploaded to the remote host via SSH.

So, to deploy current local source code to prod server you should do the following:

 ➜ fab prod deploy

If you're using git in your project, you need to make sure you did checkout to the branch you want to deploy and is up to date. Like this,

 # Checkout to the right branch and deploy
 ➜ git checkout master
 ➜ fab prod deploy

3. Node.js Deployment

Node.js Project Deployment. More information, examples and documentation coming soon :).

Inspiration

• Capistrano
• Fabric

Special Thanks

Special Thanks to Shirish Shikhrakar for the logo.

Contributing

All kinds of contributions are welcome. Read our contributing guide to learn about our development process, how to propose PRs, report bugs and suggest improvements.

Change Log

Check the CHANGELOG for full release history.

License

Licensed under The MIT License.