Hosts

Defining a host in Deployer is necessary to deploy your application. It can be a remote machine, a local machine or Amazon EC2 instances. Each host contains a hostname, a stage, one or more roles and configuration parameters.

You can define hosts with the host function in deploy.php file. Here is an example of a host definition:

host('domain.com')
    ->stage('production')
    ->roles('app')
    ->set('deploy_path', '~/app');

Host domain.com has stage production, one role app and a configuration parameter deploy_path = ~/app.

Hosts can also be described by using yaml syntax. Write this in a hosts.yml file:

domain.com:
  stage: production
  roles: app
  deploy_path: ~/app

Then to deploy.php:

inventory('hosts.yml');

Make sure that your ~/.ssh/config file contains information about your domains and how to connect. Or you can specify that information in the deploy.php file itself.

host('domain.com')
    ->user('name')
    ->port(22)
    ->configFile('~/.ssh/config')
    ->identityFile('~/.ssh/id_rsa')
    ->forwardAgent(true)
    ->multiplexing(true)
    ->addSshOption('UserKnownHostsFile', '/dev/null')
    ->addSshOption('StrictHostKeyChecking', 'no');

Best practice is to leave connecting information for hosts in the ~/.ssh/config file. That way you allow different users to connect in different ways.

Overriding config per host

For example, if you have some global configuration you can override it per host:

set('branch', 'master');

host('prod')
    ...
    ->set('branch', 'production');

Now onthe prod host the branch is set to production, on others to master.

Gathering host info

Inside any task, you can get host config with the get function, and the host object with the host function.

task('...', function () {
    $deployPath = get('deploy_path');
    
    $host = host('domain.com');
    $port = $host->getPort();
});

Multiple hosts

You can pass multiple hosts to the host function:

host('110.164.16.59', '110.164.16.34', '110.164.16.50', ...)
    ->stage('production')
    ...

If your inventory hosts.yml file contains multiple, you can change the config for all of them in the same way.

inventory('hosts.yml')
    ->roles('app')
    ...

Host ranges

If you have a lot of hosts following similar patterns, you can describe them like this rather than listing each hostname:

host('www[01:50].domain.com');

For numeric patterns, leading zeros can be included or removed, as desired. Ranges are inclusive.

You can also define alphabetic ranges:

host('db[a:f].domain.com');

Localhost

If you need to build your release before deploying on a remote machine, or deploy to localhost instead of remote, you need to define localhost:

localhost()
    ->stage('production')
    ->roles('test', 'build')
    ...

Host aliases

If you want to deploy an app to one host, but for example in different directories, you can describe two host aliases:

host('domain.com/green', 'domain.com/blue')
    ->set('deploy_path', '~/{{hostname}}')
    ...

For Deployer, those hosts are different ones, and after deploying to both hosts you will see this directory structure:

~
└── domain.com
    ├── green
    │   └── ...
    └── blue
        └── ...

One host for a few stages

Often you have only one server for prod and beta stages. You can easily configure them:

host('production')
    ->hostname('domain.com')
    ->set('deploy_path', '~/domain.com');
    
host('beta')
    ->hostname('domain.com')
    ->set('deploy_path', '~/beta.domain.com');    

Now you can deploy with these commands:

dep deploy production
dep deploy beta

Inventory file

Include hosts defined in inventory files hosts.yml by inventory function:

inventory('hosts.yml');

Here an example of an inventory file hosts.yml with the full set of configuration settings

domain.com:
  hostname: domain.com
  user: name
  port: 22
  configFile: ~/.ssh/config
  identityFile: ~/.ssh/id_rsa
  forwardAgent: true
  multiplexing: true
  sshOptions:
    UserKnownHostsFile: /dev/null
    StrictHostKeyChecking: no
  stage: production
  roles:
    - app
    - db
  deploy_path: ~/app
  extra_param: "foo {{hostname}}"

Note that, as with the host function in the deploy.php file, it's better to omit information such as user, port, identityFile, forwardAgent and use it from the ~/.ssh/config file instead.

If your inventory file contains many similar host definitions, you can use YAML extend syntax:

.base: &base
  roles: app
  deploy_path: ~/app
  ...

www1.domain.com:
  <<: *base
  stage: production
  
beta1.domain.com:
  <<: *base
  stage: beta
    
...

Hosts that start with . (dot) are called hidden and are not visible outside that file.

To define localhost in inventory files add a local key:

localhost:
  local: true
  roles: build
  ...

Become

Deployer allows you to ‘become’ another user, different from the user that logged into the machine (remote user).

host('domain.com')
    ->become('deployer')
    ...

Deployer uses sudo privilege escalation method by default.

Note that become doesn't work with tty run option.

Next: deployment flow.