Easy Deploys to Multiple Environments with Capistrano

At Viddler, we’re switching to using Git and Capistrano for our internal projects, and I was tasked with setting up the system to deploy our code to both staging and production environments. Capistrano doesn’t have built-in environment switching, but it’s dead simple to add it yourself.

The key to getting this to work is to utilize Capistrano’s ability to chain tasks–if you run cap task1 task2, it will run the two commands in the order you listed them. Variables are shared between the tasks, so if you set a variable in task1, task2 will be able to access it. To get multiple environments working, you just create tasks to set environment variables, which you call before the actual task you want to run.

The first step is to figure out which variables you need to change, and then move them into their own tasks. Here’s an example of the tasks we added:

desc "Run on staging server"
task :staging do
  server "staging.myserver.com", :app, :web, :db, :primary => true
end

desc "Run on production server"
task :production do
  server "myserver.com", :app, :web, :db, :primary => true
end

Now, if you want to deploy to staging, just run cap staging deploy, and for production run cap production deploy. Easy.

Posted on December 10, 2009 • 1 Comment
Tagged with: Capistrano, Viddler, Tips, Development, Code

PHP Facebook Paginator

While building the Viddler Facebook application, I needed to create a pagination tool that worked just like Facebook’s. After looking at their HTML and their logic of what pages to display, I came up with one, which I’m releasing for anyone to use. The function takes 5 arguments, in the following order:

• $base_path: The base path for pagination. For instance, if /videos/4/ was page 4, $base_path would be “/videos”
• $cur_page: The current page number
• $total_items: The total number of items on the page
• $per_page: The number of items that are displayed on each page
• $footer_bar: If set to “true” this does not include the “Displaying items 1-5 of 10” text, and styles it as a footer paginator, instead of a header paginator.
• $name: What you’re paginating. This shows up as “Displaying $items 5-10 of 40”

Here’s an example:

<?php echo paginator('/videos', 2, 44, 5, false, 'items'); ?>

And here’s what it would look like:

You can download the source here. Hopefully this helps someone!

Posted on July 8, 2008 • 7 Comments
Tagged with: Code Snippets, Development, PHP, Facebook, Viddler