Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

When you develop your code on Git, you can automagically (and easily) deploy to places all you want, if the repository is on the same server. If it's not, you can use something like Codeship to automate pushing for you.

Free Services Have Limits

Codeship, which I like a lot, has a limit of 100 pushes a month. In October, when Tracy and I finally deployed the newest version of our website, we actually hit that. In part, this is because we don't have a great 'test' environment where we can internally develop and share the results with the other. We both have our own versions of local environments, but you can't show your cohort 3000 miles away what you've done without pushing the code to the private development site and letting her see it.

After 100 pushes, it's $490 a year for unlimited. While the product claims to be 'free forever' for open source, there's actually no documentation that I could find on how one gets added to that list, or what the qualifications are. Does my personal open source project  qualify? I'll have to email and find out.

TravisCI Is ‘Free’

All 'free' services have a paid component. Travis, like Codeship, is free for public, open source, projects. And like Codeship, it doesn't require you to host (and thus) update anything yourself. Which is nice. In fact, it only has a few pre-requsits:

• GitHub login
• Project hosted as a repository on GitHub
• Working code
• Working build or test script

Sounds like a match made in heaven, except for the part about documentation on GitHub being out of date. I don't begrudge them, as keeping up docs is a pain and if it's with another service it's nigh impossible.

Awesome. Sign up for Travis, activate your repositories, add a .travis.yml file with the programing language, and you're ready to do… what?

Writing The Build Script

This is the weird part. You have to invent a way to push the code. Unlike DeployHQ or Codeship, there's no place to type in the code on their servers. You have to make a file and write the script.

The scripts look like this (cribbed from Florian Brinkkman):

language: php

addons:
  ssh_known_hosts:
  - $DEVELOPMENT_SERVER
  - $PRODUCTION_SERVER

before_script:
  - echo -e "Host $DEVELOPMENT_SERVERntStrictHostKeyChecking non" >> ~/.ssh/config
  - echo -e "Host $PRODUCTION_SERVERntStrictHostKeyChecking non" >> ~/.ssh/config

script:
  -
before_deploy:
  - openssl aes-256-cbc -K $ENCRYPTED_KEY -iv $ENCRYPTED_IV -in deploy_rsa.enc -out /tmp/deploy_rsa -d
  - eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
  - chmod 600 /tmp/deploy_rsa
  - ssh-add /tmp/deploy_rsa

deploy:
  - provider: script
    skip_cleanup: true
    script: ssh -p22 $DEVELOPMENT_SERVER_USER@$DEVELOPMENT_SERVER "mkdir -p $DEVELOPMENT_PATH_STABLE" && ssh -p22 $DEVELOPMENT_SERVER_USER@$DEVELOPMENT_SERVER "mkdir -p $DEVELOPMENT_PATH_TRUNK" && rsync -rav -e ssh --exclude='.git/' --exclude=scripts/ --exclude='.travis.yml' --delete-excluded ./ $DEVELOPMENT_SERVER_USER@$DEVELOPMENT_SERVER:$DEVELOPMENT_PATH_TRUNK && rsync -rav -e ssh --exclude='.git/' --exclude=scripts/ --exclude='.travis.yml' --delete-excluded ./ $DEVELOPMENT_SERVER_USER@$DEVELOPMENT_SERVER:$DEVELOPMENT_PATH_STABLE
    on:
      branch: DEVELOPMENT
  - provider: script
    skip_cleanup: true
    script: ssh -p22 $PRODUCTION_SERVER_USER@$PRODUCTION_SERVER "mkdir -p $PRODUCTION_PATH_STABLE" && rsync -rav -e ssh --exclude='.git/' --exclude=scripts/ --exclude='.travis.yml' --delete-excluded ./  $PRODUCTION_SERVER_USER@$PRODUCTION_SERVER:$PRODUCTION_PATH_STABLE
    on:
      branch: master

And to be honest, it's really not that explanatory. I read it a few times and sighed. While I'm (obviously) not opposed to learning new code to do things, I am opposed to all these services making it needlessly complicated.

One Big Problem…

You can't (easily) set up SSH keys on Travis for free. That's because they're restricted to the pro version. Now you totally can set it up, but it's incredibly insane and not something I was willing to do in the long term. And since the cost of TravisPro is $69 a month compared to Codeship's $49 or so a month, it was a no brainer.

I emailed Codeship to ask if I qualified for 'open source.' Most likely they'll tell me no, because I deploy to a closed system, but it doesn't hurt to ask.