Whenever Gem Fails to Run “bundle exec” Correctly in Capistrano

Question

I'm having problems deploying the Whenever gem to my production environment using Capistrano.

The problem is stemming from a bundle exec whenever command that's triggering some 'missing gem' issues (yet running bundle install from the shell shows that everything is in fact there!).

My feeling is that one of two things is happening: that Bundler isn't fully loading before bundle exec is being called, or that somehow there's a path issue that's running it in the wrong place.

Here's what's going on:

  * executing `deploy'
  * executing `deploy:update'
 ** transaction: start
  * executing `deploy:update_code'
    executing locally: "git ls-remote git@my-source-repository:mysource.git HEAD"
    command finished in 1847ms
  * executing "git clone -q git@my-source-repository:mysource.git /domains/myapp/releases/20130124211036 && cd /domains/myapp/releases/20130124211036 && git checkout -q -b deploy 90238bbcb993e3e7df2374ffaa13e7ed701c202e && (echo 90238bbcb993e3e7df2374ffaa13e7ed701c202e > /domains/myapp/releases/20130124211036/REVISION)"
    servers: ["myip"]
    [myip] executing command
 ** [myip :: out] Enter passphrase for key '/home/deploy/.ssh/id_rsa':
 ** [myip :: out]
    command finished in 9294ms
  * executing `deploy:finalize_update'
    triggering before callbacks for `deploy:finalize_update'
  * executing `whenever:update_crontab'
  * executing "cd /domains/myapp/releases/20130124211036 && bundle exec whenever --update-crontab My App --set environment=production --roles db"
    servers: ["myip"]
    [myip] executing command
 ** [out :: myip] Could not find carrierwave-0.5.8 in any of the sources
 ** [out :: myip] Run `bundle install` to install missing gems.
    command finished in 1967ms
*** [deploy:update_code] rolling back
  * executing "rm -rf /domains/myapp/releases/20130124211036; true"
    servers: ["myip"]
    [myip] executing command
    command finished in 998ms
failed: "rvm_path=/usr/local/rvm /usr/local/rvm/bin/rvm-shell '1.9.3' -c 'cd /domains/myapp/releases/20130124211036 && bundle exec whenever --update-crontab My App --set environment=production --roles db'" on myip

You can see that the failure is coming from this line:

bundle exec whenever --update-crontab

Which is in turn being run by my Capistrano deploy.rb.

# Your Application's "Name"
set :application, [My App]

# The URL to your application's repository
set :repository, [repo]
set :scm, :git
set :scm_passphrase, [password]

# The user you are using to deploy with (This user should have SSH access to your server)
set :user, "deploy"

# We want to deploy everything under your user, and we don't want to use sudo
set :use_sudo, false

# Where to deploy your application to.
set :deploy_to, "/domains/myapp/"

# Load RVM's capistrano plugin.    
require "rvm/capistrano"

set :rvm_ruby_string, '1.9.3'
set :rvm_type, :system  # use system-wide RVM

# Require that we use bundler to install necessary gem dependencies
require "bundler/capistrano"

set :whenever_command, "bundle exec whenever"
require "whenever/capistrano"


# -------------------------------- Server Definitions --------------------------------
# Define the hostname of your server.  If you have multiple servers for multiple purposes, we can define those below as well.
set :server_name, [server]

# We're assuming you're using a single server for your site, but if you have a seperate asset server or database server, you can specify that here.
role :app, server_name
role :web, server_name
role :db,  server_name, :primary => true

# -------------------------------- Final Config --------------------------------
# This configuration option is helpful when using svn+ssh but doesn't hurt anything to leave it enabled always.
default_run_options[:pty] = true 

namespace :deploy do
  desc "Tell Passenger to restart the app."
  task :restart do
    run "touch #{deploy_to}current/tmp/restart.txt"
  end

  task :start do
    run "cd #{deploy_to} && ln -s current/public public_html"
    run "touch #{deploy_to}current/tmp/restart.txt"
  end

  task :symlink do
    run "cd #{deploy_to} && rm current ; ln -s releases/#{release_name} current"
  end

  task :stop do
    run "rm #{deploy_to}public_html"
  end

  namespace :web do
    task :disable do
      run "cd #{deploy_to} && rm public_html && ln -s static_site public_html"
    end

    task :enable do
      run "cd #{deploy_to} && rm public_html && ln -s current/public public_html"
    end
  end


  desc "Symlink shared configs and folders on each release."
  task :symlink_shared do
    run "ln -nfs #{shared_path}/config/database.yml #{release_path}/config/database.yml"
    run "ln -nfs #{shared_path}/assets #{release_path}/public/assets"

    # create symlink to uploads folder for Carrierwave resources (i.e., book cover images)
    run "ln -nfs #{shared_path}/uploads  #{release_path}/public/uploads"
  end

  desc "Sync the public/assets directory."
  task :assets do
    system "rsync -vr --exclude='.DS_Store' public/assets #{user}@#{application}:#{shared_path}/"
  end

end

after "deploy", "deploy:migrate"

after 'deploy:update_code', 'deploy:symlink_shared'

after(:setup) do
  run "rm -rf #{deploy_to}public_html"
  run "mkdir #{deploy_to}static_site"
end

Now, the error that I'm getting about CarrierWave is bogus - I've been using CarrierWave for ages - and the issue clearly stems (as you can see by the command that triggers the error) from either Whenever itself or Bundler.

And I'm thinking that it actually may have something to do with paths related to RVM. At any rate, the bundle exec whenever isn't working.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

It turns out there were a couple problems, both of which needed addressing:

• Whenever ~> 0.8 introduced a bug with Capistrano roles
• The Whenever cap task was firing before bundle:install (this is confirmed in your code above)

See issues here: https://github.com/javan/whenever/issues/275 and here: https://github.com/javan/whenever/issues/269

To fix the problem, you most likely need to

• Update bundler on your server (-v 1.2.3)
• Update bundler locally
• Update to the newest Whenever (-v 0.8.2)

Answer 2

@ideaoforder's answer helped me too, previously though I had the same trouble caused by require 'whenever/capistrano' being on the top of the config/deploy.rb followed by require 'bundler/capistrano'. Swapping those two helped.

I have require 'bundler/capistrano' always on top of the deploy script as a rule.