Deploying a Git subdirectory in Capistrano

Question

My master branch layout is like this:

/ <-- top level

/client <-desktop client source files

/server <- Rails app

What I'd like to do is only pull down the /server directory in my deploy.rb, but I can't seem to find any way to do that. The /client directory is huge, so setting up a hook to copy /server to / won't work very well, it needs to only pull down the Rails app.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, git provides no way to do this. Instead, the 'git way' is to have two repositories -- client and server, and clone the one(s) you need.

Answer 2

You can have two git repositories (client and server) and add them to a "super-project" (app). In this "super-project" you can add the two repositories as submodules (check this tutorial).

Another possible solution (a bit more dirty) is to have separate branches for client and server, and then you can pull from the 'server' branch.

Answer 3

There is a solution. Grab crdlo's patch for capistrano and the capistrano source from github. Remove your existing capistrano gem, appy the patch, setup.rb install, and then you can use his very simple configuration line set :project, "mysubdirectory" to set a subdirectory.

The only gotcha is that apparently github doesn't "support the archive command" ... at least when he wrote it. I'm using my own private git repo over svn and it works fine, I haven't tried it with github but I imagine if enough people complain they'll add that feature.

Also see if you can get capistrano authors to add this feature into cap at the relevant bug.

Answer 4

Looks like it's also not working with codebasehq.com so I ended up making capistrano tasks that cleans the mess :-) Maybe there's actually a less hacky way of doing this by overriding some capistrano tasks...

Answer 5

Without any dirty forking action but even dirtier !

In my config/deploy.rb :

set :deploy_subdir, "project/subdir"

Then I added this new strategy to my Capfile :

require 'capistrano/recipes/deploy/strategy/remote_cache'

class RemoteCacheSubdir < Capistrano::Deploy::Strategy::RemoteCache

  private

  def repository_cache_subdir
    if configuration[:deploy_subdir] then
      File.join(repository_cache, configuration[:deploy_subdir])
    else
      repository_cache
    end
  end

  def copy_repository_cache
    logger.trace "copying the cached version to #{configuration[:release_path]}"
    if copy_exclude.empty? 
      run "cp -RPp #{repository_cache_subdir} #{configuration[:release_path]} && #{mark}"
    else
      exclusions = copy_exclude.map { |e| "--exclude=\"#{e}\"" }.join(' ')
      run "rsync -lrpt #{exclusions} #{repository_cache_subdir}/* #{configuration[:release_path]} && #{mark}"
    end
  end

end


set :strategy, RemoteCacheSubdir.new(self)