Virtual Host Setup

There is one more immediate problem: the document root of the project is /var/www/project/current/web. But... you might remember that our Nginx virtual host points to /var/www/project/web. This needs to change to /var/www/project/current/web.

That's easy to do: we could just edit this file right now! But since we provisioned our server with Ansible, let's make this change to our provision playbook... so that we feel super cool and responsible.

Sharing Provision Variables

First, in deploy.yml, add a new vars_files key. Load a file called vars/vars.yml:

This very small file holds two variables that point to where the project lives:

These are used by the provision playbook: playbook.yml. The first tells it where to create the directory. And the second - server_document_root - is used to set the document root in the Nginx virtual host!

Before we change that variable, go back to deploy.yml. Now that we're including vars.yml here, we can use the project_deploy_dir variable:

This doesn't change anything: it just kills some duplication.

Updating the Document Root

Back in vars.yml, we need to change server_document_root. But hold on! Let's get fancy! Ansistrano has a variable called ansistrano_current_dir. This is the name of the symlinked directory and - as we know - it defaults to current. Put this inside vars.yml and set it to current:

This won't change how Ansistrano works. But now, we can safely use that variable here. Set server_document_root to "{{ project_deploy_dir }}/{{ ansistrano_current_dir }}/web":

I love it! After all these changes, well, we didn't actually change our deploy playbook at all. But we did change the provision playbook.

Find your local terminal and re-provision the server:

ansible-playbook ansible/playbook.yml -i ansible/hosts.ini -l aws

This will take a few minutes to finish... but all it's really doing is changing the virtual host to point to /var/www/project/current/web. If you're not using Ansible to provision, change this however you want!

Done! Move back to your server and open the Nginx config!

sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/mootube.example.com.conf

Got it! The root is set to the correct spot:

# /etc/nginx/sites-available/mootube.example.com.conf
server {
    // ...
    root /var/www/project/current/web;
    // ...
}

Try out the Site

The ultimate goal is to get our site working at mootube.example.com. In the real world, you would configure a DNS record and point it to the server. With AWS, you can do that with their Route 53 service.

But since this is a fake domain, we need to cheat. Open up /etc/hosts:

sudo vim /etc/hosts

Near the bottom, put the IP address to our server - I'll copy it from hosts.ini - and point this to mootube.example.com:

# /etc/hosts
# ...
54.162.54.206 mootube.example.com

At this point, our code is on the server and the Nginx virtual host is pointing to it. We have the absolute basics finished! Find your browser, and try the site! http://mootube.example.com.

It works! I'm just kidding - it's totally a 500 error: we're still missing a few steps.

To see what the exact error is, go to the server and check the logs. In the virtual host, you can see that the error_log config is set to /var/log/nginx/mootube.example.com_error.log:

# /etc/nginx/sites-available/mootube.example.com.conf
server {
    # ...
    error_log /var/log/nginx/mootube.example.com_error.log;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/mootube.example.com_access.log;
}

Tail that file: sudo tail and then the path:

sudo tail /var/log/nginx/mootube.example.com_error.log

Ah! Look closely:

Failed opening required vendor/autoload.php

Of course! We have not run composer install yet. In fact, we also haven't configured our database credentials or any file permissions. All we've done is put our code on the server. But... that is pretty awesome: we already have a system that deploys in a very cool way: creating a new releases/ directory and symlinking that to current/. Our deploy is missing some steps, but it's already pretty awesome.

But before we finish it, let's talk about deploy keys so that we can deploy private repositories.