Grunt Deployment over SSH with Git

Grunt.js is a task runner that comes with various plugins for compiling, building, formatting, etc. within your project. I covered some of the basics of using this tool in my article about using Grunt Watch and LiveReload for real-time compilation.

I recently setup a simple deployment process using Grunt, so I thought I’d share the details. I found a couple deployment-related Grunt plugins out there, but they didn’t really suit my needs. Instead, I opted to simply use the grunt-ssh plugin to connect to my server and run the necessary commands to update, build and restart my application. Let’s take a look at a simplified Gruntfile.coffee.

module.exports = (grunt) ->

  grunt.initConfig

    sshconfig:
      someserver:
        host: 'someserver.com'
        username: 'someuser'
        agent: process.env.SSH_AUTH_SOCK
        agentForward: true

    sshexec:
      deploy:
        command: [
          'cd /home/someuser/app'
          'git pull origin master'
          'npm install'
          'forever stop server.js'
          'forever start server.js'
          'forever list'
        ].join(' && ')
        options:
          config: 'someserver'

  grunt.registerTask 'deploy', [
    'sshexec:deploy'
  ]

  grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-ssh')

When the task above is executed, by running grunt deploy, a number of things will happen. Grunt will SSH into someserver.com, with the user someuser. It’ll then move into the /home/someuser/app directory, pull down the latest master from the git repo, run an npm install (which, in my case, also triggers a build task), then restart the application using the forever package.

Most of the commands (and definitely the host/user names) will need to be customized on your end to suite your needs. For instance, if this isn’t a Node.js project, you may not be using npm install or forever. You can replace those commands with the proper commands to build and restart your application. This example also assumes that you already have your Git repo setup in /home/someuser/app. You may have it somewhere else, or you may not be using Git at all, and instead need to pull down files using some other process.

The entire array specified under command can be updated to suite your needs. Because I’m combining the commands using &&, if any one of them fails, the deployment process will stop.

Notes on Authentication

The example above makes a couple assumptions about authentication which may not apply in your case, so I want to offer an alternative.

In the code above you’ll see two lines like this:

agent: process.env.SSH_AUTH_SOCK
agentForward: true

This is telling the SSH process to login into the server using my active set of private keys. For this to work, I must have the server configured to accept my private key. In short, this means I need to have mykey_rsa in the ~/.ssh directory of my local machine, and the matching mykey_rsa.pub loaded into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the server. If you’re unfamiliar with this setup, or can’t make it work, you can change the agent lines above to use a password instead, like this:

password: 'PASSWORD-GOES-HERE'

Be careful with this approach though because you’ll be saving your plain text password in your Gruntfile.

Conclusion

While perhaps not the most ideal candidate for deployment, Grunt can accomplish quite a bit. The example above is very simple, but the solution I’m currently using extends this code to include deployments to multiple servers, uploads to S3, and more. If you’re shopping around for a simple way to deploy your application, give the code above a shot.