Deployment with Capistrano, Unicorn, nginx, Foreman, and Upstart

Deploying Huginn with Capistrano, Unicorn, and nginx is straight forward. You can read more about using Foreman and Upstart together in general here.

Follow these steps:

• Edit your Gemfile and add the following:

    group :production do
      gem 'unicorn'
    end
    
    group :development do
      gem 'capistrano'
      gem 'rvm-capistrano'
    end
  

• Run bundle again after you do this to install capistrano and rvm-capistrano.

• Setup a place for Huginn to run. I recommend making a dedicated user on your server for Huginn, but this is not required. Setup nginx or Apache to proxy pass to unicorn. There is an example nginx script in doc/deployment/nginx/production.conf.

• Setup a production database on your server for Huginn.

• Copy doc/deployment/unicorn/production.rb to config/unicorn/production.rb and replace instances of you with the correct username for your server.

• Copy doc/deployment/capistrano/deploy.rb to config/deploy.rb and change all instances of you and yourdomain to the appropriate values for your server setup. If you want RVM to be used and installed, uncomment the appropriate lines. If you use RVM in multi-user mode, change set rvm_type :user to set rvm_type :system.

• Run cap deploy:setup to create the basic Capistrano directory structure on your server.

• Make a copy of your .env file, setup your production settings, create a directory called /home/you/app/shared/config on your server, and place your production .env file in this directory.

  • To generate APP_SECRET_TOKEN, you can run bundle exec rake secret in your Huginn directory.
  • Change DOMAIN to match what your web server is listening for, e.g. http://yourdomain.com.
  • Set up the database with the credentials you used to create the production database earlier.
  • Follow the instructions in the comments to set up mail sending.
    • Note that G{oogle M,m}ail will usually only accept sender emails that are already set up in your Accounts options.
  • Change RAILS_ENV to production.
  • If you don't want people to join your Huginn instance, make the INVITATION_CODE something long and unguessable. Commenting it out will still default to try-huginn.
  • The rest can be left as it is.

• Make a copy of your Procfile, set it up for production, and place the copy in /home/you/app/shared/config on your server, just like you did with the .env file for production. Comment out the default development settings and comment in the default production settings.

• Run cap deploy. SSH into your server, go to your deploy_to directory, and checkout the logs coming from foreman and upstart in upstart_logs and app/current/logs. You may wish to setup logrotate, especially for the Twitter agent log.

• Run RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake db:seed to generate your admin user. Immediately login to your new Huginn installation with the username of admin and the password of password and change your email and password!

If you have improvements to this setup, please share!