Quickstart

In this tutorial we’re going to take a quick look on porter and what it can do for you in order to make your life easier when it comes to deploying your code.

Create a project directory

Porter assumes, that your project consists of modules, which can be dependent on each other. each project must have it’s own directory.:

mkdir project
cd project
touch project.ini

project.ini

In this file, we are going to specify what is the root module of your project:

[project]
name = My great project
depends = root

[hosts]
testing = user@testing-host.tld
production = user@production-host.tld
vbox = user@192.168.56.101

You can specify a different directory for your modules, if you don’t want to make a mess out of your project directory, by adding a section modules to the project.ini file, like so:

[modules]
module1 = workers/module1

Adding modules

This is where the fun begins!

In order to deploy a module, porter must know something about it. Let’s create a module directory, and see what we can put inside module definition file.:

mkdir root
touch root/root.ini

Please note, that the .ini file must be named the same way as the module itself.

Example .ini file::

[module]
path = /home/user/project/apps/root
path-vbox = /different/path/on/vbox
depends = uwsgi,module1

[scm]
url = git://git@myrepo.tld:reponame.git

[release:stable]
branch = release/0.1.2

Let’s examine this file and see what does it mean.

module section:

path

This is a special variable, which will specify where the source code has to be uploaded to.

path-vbox

If you want to override the value of a variable per a specific host, you need to suffix it with the host name (in this case, the path will be different on vbox host)

depends

module dependencies. Multiple modules should be joined by comma, e.g module1,module2,module3

scm section:

url

This is a one-line definition of where our source code is located. first part (the ‘protocol’) is mapped to module name inside porter.core.scm package, and the rest is passed to it’s constructor.

release section:

You can have multiple ‘releases’ inside your project. You must prefix them with release name. The key thing to remember here is that if you deploy with one particular release, all modules will be deployed with this particular release.

The variables are dependent on what is specified as the scm class. For example, git repository can be checked out on either a branchname or tag, therefore both of these keys are allowed here:

[release:stable]
branch = release/stable
tag = my-stable-tag

Deploy!

inside your project directory, execute the following command:

porter-admin deploy --host vbox --config production

And let the magic begin ;)