Renfield

This gem adds several interesting features to vlad the deployer

The name comes from Dracula’s servant, R. M. Renfield .

On your environment.rb :

config.gem :renfield

Then execute rake gems:install if needed.

The Renfield requires vlad – gems:install should install that one too.

You can also install renfield + dependencies manually by doing:

gem install renfield

Your lib/tasks/vlad.rake must also include vlad. Like so:

begin
  require 'vlad'
  Vlad.load :app => :passenger
rescue LoadError
  # do nothing
  raise "vlad didn't load!"
end

require 'renfield'

Renfield includes:

• color generation for console messages: red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan. Example: puts red('hello') will print a red “hello” message on the console.
• info, warning, error. They are a fancy way of printing information messages, warnings and errors. Example: info 'dump done'
• remote_rake for executing a rake on the target server. Example: remote_rake 'db:drop' will do run "cd #{current_path}; rake RAILS_ENV='production' db:drop"
• rsync can be used to move folders/files across servers

• vlad:chown does nothing yet.
• vlad:restart does run "cd #{current_path}; touch tmp/restart.txt"
• vlad:confirm asks for a confirmation before continuing. Otherwise the rake is aborted.
• vlad:clean_migrate executes rake db:reset db:migrate on the target server
• vlad:maintenance:set puts a “this site is undergoing maintenance” page on the site
• vlad:maintenance:remove removes the maintenance page

That’s all for now.