Although you can install Alaveteli and just change it when you need it, we recommend you adopt a way of deploying it automatically, especially on your production server. Alaveteli provides a deployment mechanism using Capistrano.
## Why deploy? Although you can install Alaveteli in a number of ways, once you're running, sooner or later you'll need to make changes to the site. A common example is updating your site when we issue a new release. The deployment mechanism takes care of putting all the right files into the right place, so when you need to put changes live, there's no risk of you forgetting the update all the files you've changed, or breaking the configuration by accident. Instead, deployment does all this for you automatically. It's also more efficient because it is faster than making changes or copying files by hand, so your site will be down for the shortest possible time. We **strongly recommend** you use the deployment mechanism for your production server and, if you're running one, your staging server too. ## Capistrano Capistrano is included as part of Alaveteli as a standard deployment system. ### Set up Capistrano requires things to be set up at both ends -- that is, on the server where you want Alaveteli to run, and on your own local machine. * your *local machine* may be your laptop or similar device -- as well as those belonging to anyone in your team whom you want to be able to deploy * *the server* is the machine (possibly on that will be running the Alaveteli instance you're deploying First you need to customise the deployment settings on your own machine. Copy the example file `config/deploy.yml.example` to `config/deploy.yml` and edit the settings to suit -- for example, the name of the server. These are the general steps required to set up the deployment mechanism: On your local machine: * Install packages from `config/packages` * Install Postgres and configure a user * Create a directory to deploy to and make sure your deployment user can write to it * Run `cap deploy:setup` to create directories, etc. * Run `cap deploy:update_code` so that there's a copy of the example config on the server. This process will take a long time installing gems and suchlike. It will also fail on `rake:themes:install` -- but that's OK Next, on the server: > *Note:* if you've *already* installed Alaveteli, these files may already be in place. > Otherwise, you should [install Alaveteli]({{ site.baseurl }}installing/) first. * change to the `deploy_to` directory * `cp releases/[SOME_DATE]/config/general.yml-example shared/general.yml` * `cp releases/[SOME_DATE]/config/database.yml-example shared/database.yml` * Edit those files to match your required settings Then, back on your local machine: * Back on your machine, run `cap deploy` and it should successfully deploy * Do the DB migrations: run `cap deploy:migrate` * Build the Xapian database: run `cap xapian:rebuild_index` * Configure Apache/Passenger with a `DocumentRoot` of `your_deploy_to/current/public` * Phew. Time to admire your work by browsing to the server! ### Usage Ensure you've got a `config/deploy.yml` file with the correct settings for your site. If there are other people in your team who need to deploy, you'll need to share it with them too -- it might be a good idea to keep the latest version in a [Gist](http://gist.github.com/). * to deploy to staging, just run `cap deploy` * to deploy to production, run `cap -S stage=production deploy` For additional usage instructions, see the [Capistrano wiki](https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano/wiki/).