This site is currently running on a 0.7.3 “Mephisto”:http://mephistoblog.com/ installation with a custom theme by yours truly and it’s hosted on “Dreamhost”:http://www.dreamhost.com/ servers. Out of the box Vlad works with mongrel+apache+svn. Unfortunately Dreamhost uses apache+fastcgi, but thankfully tweaking Vlad was a piece of cake.

I followed the instructions on the “examples”:http://rubyhitsquad.com/Examples.html page for Vlad, but ultimately found I needed to do a little tweaking for my environment. Based on those basic examples I ended up making the following changes to my Rakefile and deploy.rb recipe file.

Here’s what I appended to my Rakefile:

# appended to my Rakefile
require 'vlad'
Vlad.load(:app => :apache)

Here’s my config/deploy.rb file:

set :domain,      "continuousthinking.com"
set :deploy_to,   "/my/path/to/continuousthinking.com/"
set :repository,  "http://myserver/svn/continuousthinking.com/trunk"
set :web_command, "echo skipping web "

namespace :vlad do
  remote_task :start_app do
    run "pkill -f dispatch.fcgi"
    fork do
      puts "sending a request to the domain so dispatchers restart"
      `wget http://#{domain} -O /dev/null`
    end
  end

  remote_task :update do
    Rake::Task['vlad:after_update'].invoke
  end

  remote_task :after_update do
    run "ln -s #{deploy_to}/shared/system/database.yml #{deploy_to}/current/config/database.yml"
    run "rm -f /home/zdennis/continuousthinking.com &&
         ln -s #{deploy_to}/current /home/zdennis/continuousthinking.com"      
  end

  remote_task :deploy => [:update, :start_app]
end

I overrode the :web_command setting so Vlad didn’t try to restart apache. The other tasks were added to customize specific needs for the deployment of the blog:

• :start_app - kill all of dispatchers on Dreamhost and then send a request to have Dreamhost launch new ones
• :update - adds this task to the :update task call chain. This simulates an after_update.
• :after_update - create symlinks, etc to be performed after code has been updated.
• :deploy - update code and restart the app

Overall, it was a pleasant process. I give Vlad a +1.