Deploying a Git subdirectory in Capistrano

Question

My master branch layout is like this:

/ <-- top level

/client <-- desktop client source files

/server

Answer 1

For Capistrano 3.0, I use the following:

In my Capfile:

# Define a new SCM strategy, so we can deploy only a subdirectory of our repo.
module RemoteCacheWithProjectRootStrategy
  def test
    test! " [ -f #{repo_path}/HEAD ] "
  end

  def check
    test! :git, :'ls-remote', repo_url
  end

  def clone
    git :clone, '--mirror', repo_url, repo_path
  end

  def update
    git :remote, :update
  end

  def release
    git :archive, fetch(:branch), fetch(:project_root), '| tar -x -C', release_path, "--strip=#{fetch(:project_root).count('/')+1}"
  end
end

And in my deploy.rb:

# Set up a strategy to deploy only a project directory (not the whole repo)
set :git_strategy, RemoteCacheWithProjectRootStrategy
set :project_root, 'relative/path/from/your/repo'

All the important code is in the strategy release method, which uses git archive to archive only a subdirectory of the repo, then uses the --strip argument to tar to extract the archive at the right level.

UPDATE

As of Capistrano 3.3.3, you can now use the :repo_tree configuration variable, which makes this answer obsolete. For example:

set :repo_url, 'https://example.com/your_repo.git'
set :repo_tree, 'relative/path/from/your/repo' # relative path to project root in repo

See http://capistranorb.com/documentation/getting-started/configuration.