IMPORTANT NOTE

This creates and pushes tags to your git repository, please use with caution.

AutoTagger

(build is currently failing because of SSH issues on the Travis machine - but rake should pass for you locally).

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

sudo gem install auto_tagger

Contribute

GitHub Repository

The autotag executable

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

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

By default, running autotag does the following:

$ git fetch origin refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*
$ git update-ref refs/tags/demo/20100910051459 1242b283208d06661b2a916097c41c046510af68
$ git push origin refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*

The autotag executable has the following commands:

help
version
create STAGE
list STAGE
cleanup STAGE
delete_locally STAGE
delete_on_remote STAGE

The autotag executable accepts the following options:

--date-separator - the character used to separate parts of the timestamp
--fetch-refs - whether to fetch refs before creating or listing them
--push-refs - whether to push refs after creating them
--remote - specify a custom remote (defaults to "origin")
--ref-path - use a different ref directory, other than "tags"
--stages - specify all of the stages
--offline - don't push or fetch refs (is ignored with delete_on_remote command)
--dry-run - don't execute anything, but print the commands
--verbose - prints all commands as they run
--refs-to-keep - when using any clean commans, specify how many refs to keep
--executable - specify the full path to the git executable
--opts-file - the location of a custom options file

Capistrano Integration

AutoTagger comes with 2 capistrano tasks:

auto_tagger:set_branch tries to set the branch to the last tag from the previous environment.
auto_tagger:create_ref runs autotag for the current stage

Example config/deploy.rb file:

require 'auto_tagger/recipes'

# The :auto_tagger_stages variable is required
set :auto_tagger_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 :auto_tagger_working_directory, "../../"

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

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

# You need to add the before/ater callbacks yourself
before "deploy:update_code", "auto_tagger:set_branch"
after  "deploy", "auto_tagger:create_ref"
after  "deploy", "auto_tagger:print_latest_refs"

Capistano-ext multistage support

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

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

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

You can specify the following capistrano variables that correspond to the autotag options:

:auto_tagger_date_separator
:auto_tagger_push_refs
:auto_tagger_fetch_refs
:auto_tagger_remote
:auto_tagger_ref_path
:auto_tagger_offline
:auto_tagger_dry_run
:auto_tagger_verbose
:auto_tagger_refs_to_keep
:auto_tagger_executable
:auto_tagger_opts_file
:auto_tagger_working_directory

auto_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 :auto_tagger_stages, [:ci, :staging, :production]

The deployments would look like this:

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

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

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

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

cap staging deploy

and the branch will be set for you automatically.

auto_tagger:create_ref

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.

If you don't specify any auto_tagger_stages, auto_tagger will create a tag that starts with "production".

auto_tagger:print_latest_refs

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", "auto_tagger:print_latest_refs"

Or call it directly, like:

cap production auto_tagger:print_latest_refs

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

Configuration

You can store options in an options file, which is .auto_tagger by default. You can set options in this file like so:

--date-separator=-
--ref-path=autotags
--refs-to-keep=5

Testing

Setup

Authorize your local SSH keys to access your local machine:
```
./script/configure-ssh-localhost.sh
```
To verify, you should be able to connect to localhost without supplying a password:
```
ssh localhost
```
Install bundler:
```
gem install bundler
```
Install the project's bundle:
```
bundle install
```

Running

To run the entire suite:

rake

To run individual test suites:

rake spec
rake features

Releasing

run rake and make sure that things are green
update the changelog to say what you've done
update the version
commit your changes
run rake build
run rake install and then open the gem and make sure everything looks ok
run rake release

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
Pat Nakajima for making auto_tagger a better ruby citizen
Josh Susser for recommending the date format changes

auto_tagger

Runtime