Incremental FTP/SSH deployment tool
Project description
Creep README file
Overview
Creep is an incremental deploy tool. It allows delta update from any Git repository or a regular directory to a FTP or SSH remote server. Its purpose is to deploy applications where files needed on remote servers (e.g. production) match local files, that is to say when "deployment" actually means "copy with some optional files preprocessing". For example it works best for HTML/CSS/JS websites or server technologies like PHP.
Incremental deployment means Creep keeps track of deployed files on all remote locations. Only modified files are transferred between two deployments. This tracking mechanism depends on the type of directory used, for exemple Creep uses revision hashes when deploying from a Git repository.
Installing
You will need an environment with Python 3 (>= 3.6) before installing Creep.
Creep can be installed using either PIP or manual install from sources. If you choose to use PIP, just type the following:
$ pip3 install creep
$ creep -h # display help to ensure install worked properly
If you prefer manual install checkout the Git repository anywhere you want. Then
create a symbolic link in your $PATH
to file creep/creep.py
. Last step is
convenient but not mandatory, you can call Creep using full path to creep.py
:
$ git clone https://github.com/r3c/creep.git
$ cd creep
$ sudo ln -s creep/creep.py /usr/bin/creep
$ creep -h # display help
After installation go to your project folder and continue reading to deploy your first project.
Quick start
First go to the directory you want to deploy, e.g. the src
folder of some
project. It can be inside a Git repository or just be a regular folder, Creep
will select a suitable default configuration either way. Create a new
.creep.env
file inside this directory with following JSON content:
$ cd path/to/your/project
$ cat > .creep.env << EOF
{
"default": {
"connection": "file:////tmp/creep-quickstart"
}
}
EOF
Mind the quadruple slash in file:////tmp/creep-quickstart
value. Once file is
saved, create the directory and execute creep with no parameter:
$ mkdir /tmp/creep-quickstart
$ creep
Creep will tell you about deploying this project for the first time and ask you
to confirm. Answer y
to continue. It will display the full list of files in
your project (by scanning file system or Git history) then ask you again to
confirm. Enter y
and Creep will deploy your project to directory
/tmp/creep-quickstart
.
Now if you try to execute creep again you'll see a message saying no action is
required. Deployment location now contains an up-to-date version of your project
and Creep saved this information. Try to change some files (and git commit
them if you were using Git) then execute the command again. This time Creep will
send only the file you changed rather than the full project.
This basic example shows how to incrementally deploy a project to some local directory. Next sections will show how to deploy to remote locations (FTP or SSH) and register several deployment configurations.
Environment file
As seen before Creep reads deployment location(s) from a configuration file
called environment file. It contains one or more named location(s) pointing to
servers you want to deploy to. Name this file .creep.env
and put it in any
directory you want to deploy.
Creep will deploy contents of this directory to remote location(s) and preserve
hierarchical structure. You can have several environment files in several
sub-directories inside your projet. For example one in src
directory to deploy
executable code and another one in assets
directory to deploy static files to
web servers.
Environment configuration file uses JSON format and looks like this:
{
"default": {
"connection": "file:///../webdev/my-project"
},
"integration": {
"connection": "ftp://me:password@my-dev-server/www-data"
},
"production": {
"connection": "ssh://login@my-prod-server.com/www-data"
}
}
Elements in the root object specify an available deployment location. Each one
must have at least a connection
string containing protocol, address,
credentials and/or path. Read details below for more information about supported
protocols.
Once environment configuration file is ready you can start using Creep. Just
type creep <name>
where <name>
is name of a configured location. You can
also specify multiple locations (creep <name1> <name2> ...
) or use *
to
deploy everywhere (creep '*'
, don't forget to escape the *
if you're running
Creep from within a shell). If you don't specify any name Creep will deploy to
default
location.
Creep will then fetch last deployed revision from remote location and compute
difference. When you deploy for the first time there is no last deployed
revision so Creep will perform a full deploy. After each successful
deployment it will save revision to remote location in a .creep.rev
file.
Storing revision information on remote location keeps related data altogether
and works well if you're not the only developer doing deployments. In case you
prefer storing them locally, just add a new local
option with value true
for all affected locations in your .creep.env
file:
{
...
"integration": {
"connection": "ftp://me:password@my-dev-server/www-data/",
"local": true
},
...
}
You can specify some options depending on the protocol you're using. To specify
options just add a options
JSON object property holding required options:
{
...
"default": {
"connection": "ssh://www-data@localhost/www.mywebsite.com/",
"options": {
"extra": "-o StrictHostKeyChecking=no"
}
},
...
}
Here is the list of supported protocols with expected connection string format and available options:
- Local file system:
- Use connection format
file:///path
where path is relative to current directory. - Note the use of triple slash
///
because file protocol has no hostname.
- Use connection format
- FTP:
- Use connection format
ftp://user:pass@host:port/path
whereuser
andpass
are optional credentials (anonymous login will be used if they're missing),port
is an optional FTP port which defaults to 21, andpath
is a path relative to FTP user home directory. - Boolean option
passive
enables (default) or disables passive mode.
- Use connection format
- SSH:
- Use connection format
ssh://user@host:port/path
with same variables than the ones used for FTP deployment. No password can be specified here so you'll need to either enter password manually or setup SSH keys and start SSH agent. - String option
extra
can be used to pass parameters to SSH command as shown in example above.
- Use connection format
Path is relative by default in all protocols. Start your path by a slash /
character to specify an absolute path, e.g. file:////opt/myproject
.
Note that environment files only describe information about external locations and may contain passwords. For those reasons they should be excluded from your versionning and kept only on machines performing deployments.
If you prefer not to write environment configuration as files, you can also
pass it as a JSON string using -e
command line option:
creep -e '{"default": {"connection": "ftp://me:password@host"}}'
Definition file
Creep supports another configuration file, called definition file. It's used
to define how to detect changes in files and what preprocessing operations
should be applied on files upon transfer. Create a new .creep.def
file and put
it in the same directories your environment files are. As opposed to environment
files this one is bound to your project and should be shared along with other
project files.
Definition configuration file uses JSON format and looks like this:
{
"source": "hash",
"options": {
"algorithm": "md5",
"follow": false
},
"modifiers": [
{
"pattern": "\\.dist$",
"filter": "false"
}
]
}
The source
part specifies how Creep should analyze differences when you
execute it inside this directory. When this option is not specified Creep will
auto-detect it based on current environment. The options
allows you to tune
behavior of the selected source
by specifying custom parameters. Here is the
list of supported sources and associated options:
- Git versionning:
- Specify
git
source so localgit
executable is used to get diff between two revisions. When using this mode Creep relies on Git history and only needs to remember which revision has been deployed. It also allows you to manually specify the revision you want to deploy through command line argument. - No options are available for this source type.
- Specify
- File hash:
- Specify
hash
source to have Creep computing a hash of each file to detect differences. This mode has a higher overhead than Git since it has to save a value for each file rather than one unique revision, but can work with any regular folder. - String option
algorithm
selects the hashing algorithm to be used among sha1, sha256, sha512 or md5 (default). - Boolean option
follow
specifies whether symbolic links should be followed or ignored (default).
- Specify
The modifiers
part defines actions to perform on files before they're sent to
remote locations (e.g. rename, compile, minify, obfuscate, etc.). Each modifier
must define a regular expression pattern
property to select files it affects,
and processing actions that will be applied on them.
Here is an example of modifiers
section in a definition configuration.
Remember backslashes must be escaped in JSON, hence the double \\
used in
regular expression patterns:
{
...
"modifiers": [
{
"pattern": "\\.dist$",
"filter": "false"
},
{
"pattern": "\\.min\\.js$"
},
{
"pattern": "\\.js$",
"modify": "uglifyjs --compress --mangle -- '{}'"
},
{
"pattern": "(.*)\\.less$",
"rename": "\\1.css",
"modify": "lessc --clean-css '{}'",
"link": "find . -name '*.less' | xargs grep -Fl \"$(basename '{}')\" || true"
}
]
...
}
Creep evaluates modifiers in sequence and one file can only match one modifier: evaluation stops after the first matched one. For each file matching a modifier, associated actions (if any) are applied on it. Available modifier actions are listed below:
filter
action specifies a shell command to be executed, where special{}
token is replaced by an absolute path to the file being matched. If this command returns a non-zero result file won't be sent to remote location.- In the example above, the
false
command is used to exclude files with name ending with.dist
from deployment. - Empty string value can also be used to always exclude files. It's equivalent
to the
false
command used in the example above but has better portability.
- In the example above, the
rename
action specifies a new name for file and supports back references on the regular expression used inpattern
.- In the example above, files ending with
.less
will have their extension changed to.css
: the back reference\\1
captured original file name without extension in associated pattern.
- In the example above, files ending with
modify
action specifies a shell command (similar tofilter
action). Standard output of this command will replace content of the file before it's sent to remote location.- In the example above, executable
uglifyjs
is called to minify JavaScript files (ending with.js
). - Note presence of a rule which matches files with name ending with
.min.js
: it doesn't specify any action but prevents the\.js$
rule from being triggered for files that are already minified.
- In the example above, executable
link
action specifies a shell command similar to theadapt
one but is expected to return a path (relative to deployment directory) to all files that should be sent whenever matched ones are matched.- In the example above, a command using
find
andgrep
is used to list all files referencing currently ones, so they're also sent to remote location whenever the file they reference is changed. - Note the regular expression could have been more specific, but the point is to be sure to include all changed files when deploying ; a few false positives will just cause harmless extra synchronizations.
- In the example above, a command using
Creep always appends two modifiers to filter to exclude environment and definition files from deployments. You shouldn't need to change this behavior, but you may do so by adding explicit modifiers matching them.
Like for environment configuration you can also specify definition
configuration as a JSON string instead of file using -d
command line option:
creep -d '{"source": "hash"}'
Troubleshooting
This project is still under develpement and may not behave as you would expect.
In case of issue the -v
(verbose) switch may help you understanding how your
environment and definition files are used.
If you can't figure out what's happening don't hesitate to open an issue on GitHub or contact me!
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