Switchtower Port Issues

daveh · January 26, 2006, 5:51pm

Hi there,

I’m having some difficulties finding some decent info on getting
Switchtower to function for my needs. I’ve read most of the
Switchtower doc on Peak Obsession,
however it’s not answering some potent questions I have.

The doc mentions, as an example, using an SVN repos at
http://svn.switchtower.com/flipper/trunk
What if I only access my SVN repos through SSH? When you set the
repository in the deploy.rb file what do you put for this line?

set :repository, “http://svn.switchtower.com/flipper/trunk”

I would ‘normally’ access my repository like this:
svn co svn+ssh://[email protected]/home/svn/repos/app app

The second question I have is when dealing with defining the roles
in the deploy.rb file. I run all my development on non-standard ports
(because my ISP blocks the standard ports… grrr!). The example they
used was the following:

role :app, “simple.switchtower.com”
role :web, “simple.switchtower.com”
role :db, “simple.switchtower.com”

I have yet to experiment because of trying to figure out question 1’s
issues. But, once I get that working, would the following work if all
of them were running on port 45000 as an example?

role :app, “simple.switchtower.com:45000”
role :web, “simple.switchtower.com:45000”
role :db, “simple.switchtower.com:45000”

I’m using Lighttpd currently as my server. Am I going to have to
get Apache working so I can use Switchtower?

Sorry for all the noobie questions!

Thanks!
Dave H.

daveh · January 26, 2006, 6:00pm

On Jan 26, 2006, at 9:47 AM, Dave H. wrote:

repository in the deploy.rb file what do you put for this line?

set :repository, “http://svn.switchtower.com/flipper/trunk”

I would ‘normally’ access my repository like this:
svn co svn+ssh://[email protected]/home/svn/repos/app app

You would put the “svn+ssh://…” text in the :repository variable,
in this case. Basically, whatever the address of your repository,
that’s what you put there. (Note, however, that ST won’t work with
file:// repositories–the repo has to be accessible both from the
local host and the remote host.)

issues. But, once I get that working, would the following work if all
of them were running on port 45000 as an example?

role :app, “simple.switchtower.com:45000”
role :web, “simple.switchtower.com:45000”
role :db, “simple.switchtower.com:45000”

What do you mean, “running”? The app names here are only used as
targets for SSH, so as long as SSH is running on the default port
(22), you should be fine. If it isn’t, you can specify the ssh port
via the ssh_options hash:

ssh_options[:port] = 45000

I’m using Lighttpd currently as my server. Am I going to have to
get Apache working so I can use Switchtower?

Nope, lighttpd works ok as long as you don’t have to restart it via
switchtower. (For some reason no one has yet determined, if you try
to restart lighttpd via switchtower, lighttpd shuts down just fine
but never starts up again.) If you use externally spawned fastcgi
listeners (as described in the third chapter of the ST manual, I
believe) you should be just fine.

Sorry for all the noobie questions!

No worries! ST documentation has a ways to go, yet.

Jamis

daveh · January 26, 2006, 6:06pm

On Jan 26, 2006, at 11:59 AM, Jamis B. wrote:

http://svn.switchtower.com/flipper/trunk
repository, that’s what you put there. (Note, however, that ST
role :db, “simple.switchtower.com”
targets for SSH, so as long as SSH is running on the default port
to restart lighttpd via switchtower, lighttpd shuts down just fine
but never starts up again.) If you use externally spawned fastcgi
listeners (as described in the third chapter of the ST manual, I
believe) you should be just fine.

I noticed that it seems to start every other time that the restart
task is run (when a lighttpd restart was included in the task). I
changed my deploy.rb around, and now it starts reliably. Here are the
tasks that I added:

desc “Restart lighty”
task :before_restart, :roles => :app do
run “kill -9 cat /home/#{user}/var/run/lighttpd.pid”
end

desc “Restart lighty”
task :after_restart, :roles => :app do
run “/usr/local/sbin/lighttpd -f /home/#{user}/web/lighttpd/config/
lighttpd.conf”
end

daveh · January 26, 2006, 6:27pm

Perhaps the problem is lighttpd shutting down slowly,
so when the start happens, the .pid file is still
around.

Perhaps just a sleep between stop and start, or a
loop to wait for the .pid file to go away?

–
– Tom M.

daveh · January 26, 2006, 6:24pm

On Jan 26, 2006, at 10:05 AM, Joseph H. wrote:

desc “Restart lighty”
task :after_restart, :roles => :app do
run “/usr/local/sbin/lighttpd -f /home/#{user}/web/lighttpd/
config/lighttpd.conf”
end

Fascinating! Thanks for this work-around, Joseph. I’m anxious to try
it out and see if it works for me. I’m still mystified as to why this
works, and the other doesn’t… Very odd.

Jamis

daveh · January 26, 2006, 6:43pm

On Jan 26, 2006, at 10:27 AM, Tom M. wrote:

Perhaps the problem is lighttpd shutting down slowly,
so when the start happens, the .pid file is still
around.

Perhaps just a sleep between stop and start, or a
loop to wait for the .pid file to go away?

That’s what I thought, too, but even a 10s sleep doesn’t seem to
help. I haven’t try looping to wait for the pid file to disappear,
though. Has anyone else tried that?

Jamis

daveh · January 26, 2006, 6:55pm

Jamis,

Thanks for the info. That helped a lot actually!

I was actually excited to see this error pop up:

rake deploy
(in /Users/dhoefler/RubyProjects/rlog)
loading configuration
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/switchtower-0.10.0/lib/switchtower/recipes/standard.rb
loading configuration ./config/deploy.rb
executing task deploy
transaction: start
executing task update_code
querying latest revision…
ssh: connect to host 12.123.12.12 port 22: Connection refused
svn: Connection closed unexpectedly
ssh: connect to host 12.123.12.12 port 22: Connection refused
svn: Connection closed unexpectedly
ssh: connect to host 12.123.12.12 port 22: Connection refused
svn: Connection closed unexpectedly
ssh: connect to host 12.123.12.12 port 22: Connection refused
svn: Connection closed unexpectedly
ssh: connect to host 12.123.12.12 port 22: Connection refused
svn: Connection closed unexpectedly
svn: ‘.’ is not a working copy
svn: ‘.’ is not a working copy
(proceed to an endless loop of the previous line)

If it matters, I’m trying to connect to my Ubuntu box. I did change
the port option in the config deploy to:

ssh_options[:port] = 43022

This is odd though, I can SSH in just fine using an alternate port
(ssh -p 43022 12.123.12.12) . I think there’s something I’m forgetting
to set up with SVN.

Hmm…

-Dave

daveh · January 26, 2006, 8:10pm

On Jan 26, 2006, at 9:22 AM, Jamis B. wrote:

end

Jamis

Please note that if you do it this way that you will eventually end

up leaving zombie fcgi dispatchers laying around taking up memory.
You need to also kill the dispatchers with kill -9 before you restart
lighty. Of course if you are using stand alone dispatchers then the
reaper will work to restart those.

Here are my tasks for restarting lighty _and_ the dispatchers. This

works for me every time with switchtower.

desc “Restart lighty”
task :before_restart, :roles => :app do
pid_of_lighty = ps axww | grep lighttpd | grep -v grep | grep myapp.lighttpd.conf
pids_of_dispatchers = ps axww | grep dispatch.fcgi | grep -v grep | grep /yhr/public/dispatch.fcgi
lighty = pid_of_lighty.scan(/\d*/).first
dispatchers = pids_of_dispatchers.split(/\n/).map {|line| line.scan
(/\d*/).first }
run “kill -9 #{lighty} #{dispatchers.join(’ ')}”
end

desc “Restart lighty”
task :after_restart, :roles => :app do
run “/usr/local/sbin/lighttpd -f /etc/myapp.lighttpd.conf”
end

Note that you need to replace the last grep's in each of the first

ps commands to match something unique to your specific lighty and
rails app if you are running more then one lighty on the server so
that it only affects the lighty and dispatchers for that particular
rails app.

Cheers-

-Ezra Z.
Yakima Herald-Republic
WebMaster

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