IMPORTANT NOTE

This gem is still in it's infancy, and lots of things might change. Since this creates and pushes tags to your git repository, please use with caution.

AutoTagger

AutoTagger is a gem that helps you automatically create a date-stamped tag for each stage of your deployment, and deploy from the last tag from the previous environment.

Let's say you have the following workflow:

  • Run all test on a Continuous Integration (CI) server
  • Deploy to a staging server
  • Deploy to a production server

You can use the autotag command to tag releases on your CI box, then use the capistrano tasks to auto-tag each release.

Installation

gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
sudo gem install zilkey-auto_tagger

Contribute

The autotag executable

Installing the gem creates an executable file named autotag, which takes two arguments: the stage, and optionally the path to the git repo:

$ autotag demo  # => creates a tag like demo/200804041234 in the current directory
$ autotag demo . # => same as above
$ autotag demo /Users/me/foo # => cd's to /Users/me/foo before creating the tag

Running autotag does the following:

$ git fetch origin --tags
$ git tag <stage>/<timestamp>
$ git push origin --tags

Capistrano Integration

AutoTagger comes with 2 capistrano tasks:

  • release_tagger:set_branch tries to set the branch to the last tag from the previous environment.
  • release_tagger:create_tag runs autotag for the current stage

Example config/deploy.rb file:

require 'release_tagger'

# The :autotagger_stages variable is required
set :autotagger_stages, [:ci, :staging, :production]

# The :working_directory variable is optional, and defaults to Dir.pwd
# :working_directory can be an absolute or relative path
set :working_directory, "../../"

task :production do
  # In each of your environments that need auto-branch setting, you need to set :stage
  set :stage, :production
end

task :staging do
  # If you do not set stage, it will not auto-set your branch
  # set :stage, :staging
end

# You need to add the before/ater callbacks yourself
before "deploy:update_code", "release_tagger:set_branch"
after  "deploy", "release_tagger:create_tag"
after  "deploy", "release_tagger:write_tag_to_shared"
after  "deploy", "release_tagger:print_latest_tags"

Cpistano-ext multistage support

If you use capistano-ext multistage, you can use auto_tagger.

set :autotagger_stages, [:ci, :staging, :production]
set :stages, [:staging, :production]
set :default_stage, :staging
require 'capistrano/ext/multistage'

When you deploy, autotagger will auto-detect your current stage.

release_tagger:set_branch

This task sets the git branch to the latest tag from the previous stage. Assume you have the following tags in your git repository:

  • ci/01
  • staging/01
  • production/01

And the following stages in your capistrano file:

set :autotagger_stages, [:ci, :staging, :production]

The deployments would look like this:

cap staging release_tagger:set_branch    # => sets branch to ci/01
cap production release_tagger:set_branch # => sets branch to staging/01

You can override with with the -Shead and -Stag options

cap staging release_tagger:set_branch -Shead=true      # => sets branch to master
cap staging release_tagger:set_branch -Stag=staging/01 # => sets branch to staging/01

If you add before "deploy:update_code", "release_tagger:set_branch", you can just deploy with:

cap staging deploy

and the branch will be set for you automatically.

release_tagger:create_tag

This cap task creates a new tag, based on the latest tag from the previous environment.

If there is no tag from the previous stage, it creates a new tag from the latest commit in your working directory.

release_tagger:print_latest_tags

This task reads the git version from the text file in shared:

cap staging release_tagger:read_tag_from_shared

release_tagger:print_latest_tags

This task takes the latest tag from each environment and prints it to the screen. You can add it to your deploy.rb like so:

after  "deploy", "release_tagger:print_latest_tags"

Or call it directly, like:

cap production release_tagger:print_latest_tags

This will produce output like:

** AUTO TAGGER: release tag history is:
 ** ci         ci/20090331045345              8031807feb5f4f99dd83257cdc07081fa6080cba some commit message
 ** staging    staging/20090331050908         8031807feb5f4f99dd83257cdc07081fa6080cba some commit message
 ** production production/20090331050917      8031807feb5f4f99dd83257cdc07081fa6080cba some commit message

Running tests:

You must be able to ssh into your box via localhost (remote login). To make this easier, add your own key to your own account:

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub >>~/.ssh/authorized_keys

To ensure that this has worked, try this:

ssh localhost

If it asks you for a password, you've done something wrong.

To run the specs, execute:

spec spec/

To run the cucumber features, execute:

cucumber features/

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to

  • Brian Takita for the original recipes
  • Mike Dalessio for his git fu
  • Chad Wooley for his feature ideas
  • Tim Holahan for his QA

Copyright (c) 2009 [Jeff Dean], released under the MIT license