Capistrano plugin for deploying to Amazon EC2 instances by security groups.

This plugin supports the deployment strategy of using the security groups feature of Amazon EC2. If you are using auto-scaling of instances, new hostnames will be added and removed regularly, causing problems when you have to specify your servers hostnames in your Capistrano recipes.

By using security groups to organize your instances by roles, you have created a simple database of instances that is automatically updated as auto-scaling happens. By using a provisioning tool like Sprinkle, Moonshine, Chef, Puppet, Rubber (etc.) to automatically configure instances upon launch (through EC2 user-data), you have a completely automated workflow for configuring and deploying auto-scaling instances.

capistrano-ec2group is provided as a Ruby gem, with the following dependencies:

• Capistrano 2 gem
• RightAWS gem

You can install it with RubyGems, through RubyForge or GitHub.

$ gem install capistrano-ec2group

$ gem sources -a http://gems.github.com (you only have to do this once)
$ gem install logandk-capistrano-ec2group

In order to use the capistrano-ec2group plugin, you must require it in your deploy.rb:

require 'capistrano/ec2group'

Then you must specify your Amazon EC2 credentials:

set :aws_access_key_id, '???'
set :aws_secret_access_key, '???'

If you are running capistrano from ec2 and would like to use private dns names

set :aws_pvt_dns, true

Optionally setting additional parameters, such as the region:

set :aws_params, :region => 'eu-west-1'

In order to define your instance groups, you must specify the security group name, the roles and params:

group :webserver, :web
group :app_myappname, :app
group :lamp, :web, :app
group "MySQL Servers", :db, :port => 22000

Then just sit back, relax and cap deploy!

Additional RDoc documentation is available at: http://rdoc.info/projects/logandk/capistrano-ec2group

• capistrano: http://capify.org
• RightAws: http://rightaws.rubyforge.org
• Amazon AWS: http://aws.amazon.com

• capistrano-ec2group: Logan Raarup
• capistrano: Jamis Buck

###Thanks to###

• Phillip Goldenburg - Terminated instance bug fix

Copyright (c) 2009 Logan Raarup, released under the MIT license