PullBoy

Pullboy is a VERY simple server that listens for incoming connections and deploys projects according to a predefined script.

Steps

First we install pullboy. pip install pullboy or the preferred one pipenv install pullboy. Second we write the deploy config file. An example would be:

pullboy:
    workdir: '~/pullboy'
    script:
        - git pull origin master
        - make
    token: 'thisisnosecret'
    active: true  # This is optional. Default is assumed to be true

For Gitlab you can add push events in the webhooks and pullboy will take care of auto deploy for you. Here we don't really need a project name so we can have a config like so:

a_token_for_gitlab_to_identify_the_script:
    workdir: '~/pullboy'
    script:
        - git pull origin master
        - make
    active: true
    branch: master
    gitlab: true

See config.yml for a full example.

We can now add a gitlab webhook which has the secret token as a_token_for_gitlab_to_identify_the_script. That's all there is to it. Now whenever someone pushes to the repo and it's the master branch. the script will be executed.

Now we run pullboy with the following command pullboy config.yaml.

That's it.

Notes

To make pullboy deploy something all you need to do is hit https://wherever.pullboy.is.running.com:8764/deploy with the items project and token in the POST body. For this activity HTTPS is recommended.

Tokens are meant to be kept a secret otherwise anyone with access to this URL can deploy the code (we don't want it to be that simple do we?). An example cURL command to deploy the project shown in the config above would be:

curl -X POST -F project=pullboy -F token=thisisnosecret https://wherever.pullboy.is.running.com:8764/deploy
curl -X POST -F project=pullboy -F token=thisisnosecret https://wherever.pullboy.is.running.com:8764/pullboy/deploy
curl -X POST -F project=pullboy -F token=thisisnosecret https://wherever.pullboy.is.running.com:8764/pullboy/deploy/user
curl -X POST -F project=pullboy -F token=thisisnosecret https://wherever.pullboy.is.running.com:8764/pullboy/deploy/ci
curl -X POST -F project=pullboy -F token=thisisnosecret https://wherever.pullboy.is.running.com:8764/pullboy/deploy/bossman

The url does not matter, whatever URL you access, pullboy will be ready to work. This makes it easy to use with a reverse proxy like Nginx where you can forward a url like /pullboy/deployments/ci and /pullboy/deployments/manual to Pullboy. The Nginx logs can act as logs for deployments.

Let's Encrypt is the recommended way to obtain HTTPS but in case you are using your laptop for something, ngrok is a neat way to get HTTPS.