Capistrano::SPA

Want to deploy a single-page-application (which uses your rails api) along with your rails backend?

• using capistrano v3
• keeping front-end app in separate repository
• not keeping public directory inside your rails app repository

1. Add to Gemfile: gem "capistrano-spa"
2. Require in Capfile: require 'capistrano/spa'

Preferred way is to use it with capistrano rsync extension.

Task spa:all consists of 4 tasks:

1. spa:create_cache - clones your SPA app into YOUR_RAILS_APP/tmp (or other dir of your choice)
2. spa:update_cache - updates spa cache dir, if already been cloned
3. spa:build: builds the SPA app with command you've passed (defaults to yarn install && yarn build)
4. spa:copy_to_rsync_dir: copies the built package (that usually means dist) into the public folder of rsync cache directory of your Rails application

You need to call the Capistrano task provided by this gem by yourself (this way you can call it anytime you need - depending on your deploy strategy). If you're using capistrano-rsync, then proper way to do it is after rails rsync cache dir has been prepared - it's going to append content of SPA app into public dir just before it's rsync'ed to server.

after 'rsync:stage_done', 'spa:all'

• :spa_repo_url - required
• :spa_cache_dir, defaults to: tmp/spa
• :spa_branch, , defaults to: master
• :spa_build_dir, defaults to: dist
• :spa_git_remote, defaults to: origin
• :rsync_cache_dir, default to tmp/deploy
• :spa_build_cmds, default to: [[:yarn, "install"], [:yarn, "build"]]

To precompile rails assets properly, you can either:

• do it locally after SPA app is built, for example:

  after 'spa:all', 'assets:my_custom_precompile_task'

• or using capistrano-rails, but to make it work you need to clear one of it's tasks which is symlinking public/assets dir, which we don't want:

  Rake::Task["deploy:set_linked_dirs"].clear

If you don't want to use rsync strategy for your rails app, you can skip the last task (spa:copy_to_rsync_dir) and move the SPA build to the server by yourself in anyway you like it.

Also, depending on your apache/nginx server config, index.html should be served automatically, but if it's not on static files whitelist you can either add it to the list or serve index.html from controller, like:

root "welcome#index"

def index
  render file: 'public/index.html', layout: false
end