Deploy Hooks & parameters.yml

Go look inside the current/ directory on your server. Guess what? There is no parameters.yml file yet! That's no surprise! This is not committed to Git, so it's not downloaded from Git.

Adding a Hook

Let's add this by adding a hook into Ansistrano. How? To add a hook before or after any of these stages, you can override a variable... and you can see those variables back down in the variable reference. Ah, yes! Choose the correct variable for the hook you want, set it to a new file, and start adding tasks!

Copy the ansistrano_after_symlink_shared_tasks_file variable: we're going to add a hook after the "Symlink Shared" stage. Why there? Well, this is after any shared symlinks have been created... but just before the site becomes live. Said differently, at this stage, our site is functional... but it's not live yet. It's a great hook spot.

Inside deploy.yml, paste that variable and set it to a new file: {{ playbook_dir }}/deploy/after-symlink-shared.yml:

Copy that filename and, inside ansible/, create that deploy/ directory and a new file: after-symlink-shared.yml.

Creating parameters.yml

Ok, next question: how should we create parameters.yml? There are two options. The easier, but less automatic option is to configure app/config/parameters.yml as a shared file. If we did that, on the next deploy, Ansistrano would create an app/config/parameters.yml file inside shared/. We could then SSH onto the server manually and configure that file. As soon as we did that, all future deploys would use this shared file. We'll cover shared files more later.

But... this requires manual work... and each time the file needs to change... you need to remember to update it... manually. I remember nothing!

The second option is to create parameters.yml via Ansible. Inside the ansible/ directory, create a new templates/ directory. Next, copy app/config/parameters.yml.dist from your project into here. Big picture, here's the plan: we will use the Ansible template module, to render variables inside this file, and deploy it to the server. But... to start, we're going to just use these hardcoded values.

Back in after-symlink-shared.yml, add a new task: "Setup infrastructure-related parameters". Use the template module to, for now, copy {{ playbook_dir }}/templates/parameters.yml.dist into the new release directory:

But... um... how do we know what the name of the new release directory is? I mean, it's always changing!? And this hook is before the current symlink is created, so we can't use that.

Go back to the Ansistrano docs and search for ansistrano_release_path. Yes! Near the bottom, there's a section called "Variables in custom tasks". Ansistrano gives us a few really helpful variables... and this explains them.

And yes! The first variable is exactly what we need. But don't forget about the others: you may need them someday.

Back in after-symlink-shared.yml, set the destination to {{ ansistrano_release_path.stdout }}/app/config/parameters.yml:

We're not customizing anything in this file yet... but this should be enough to get it onto the server. Let's try it: deploy, deploy!

ansible-playbook -i ansible/hosts.ini ansible/deploy.yml

It takes a few moments... but it worked! On your server, move back into the current directory. Yes! Now we have a parameters.yml file.

Cool! But... of course... it's still full of hardcoded info. Next, we need to fill this file with our real, production config. And we need to do that securely.