Brightbox Ruby deployment gem 2.4.1 released

We’ve just released version 2.4.1 of the Brightbox deployment gem, which includes a raft of improvements and some important changes.  In general, it fixes a few corner cases with the bundler support and makes things easier to customize.

Other important improvements include

• Better Rake handling
• Bundler support improvements
  • Bundler is now used by default. Set :bundle_disable to true to override this behaviour.
  • Support for setting the bundler command with :bundle_cmd
  • Bundler now runs with --quiet
  • rake commands are invoked using bundle exec
• The mongrel & monit recipes are now only included when explicitly required with: require 'brightbox/mongrel' in your deployment recipe
• The :web role is no longer compulsory and can now be undefined, improving support for unicorn-only app node type deployments
• The default passenger restart strategy has been changed to :soft
• Improvements to Apt dependency handling
  • Avoid an unnecessary apt-get update if dependencies aren't actually defined (avoids needing to run sudo)
  • Allow apt handling to be disabled explicitly with :packages_install
  • Allow disabling on individual servers with the :packages_install attribute
  • Use new Capistrano sudo helper
  • Improved logging
• Better documentation in default deploy.rb
• Passenger recipes are now optional, so you can more easily use our shared asset system and other general helpers with your own recipes.

One noticeable change is that the brightbox command has been deprecated and replaced by the brightbox-capify command, which is more inline with Capistrano’s capify. This really only matters when you’re setting up a new app.

If you need any help upgrading, or encounter any problems, you can email us at support at brightbox.co.uk.