SwitchTower Gotchas

If you’re using SwitchTower to deploy your rails apps (it’s fun!), you might run into these errors:

• A Net::SSH authorization issue
• Problems running the reaper, spinner or spawner scripts

The problems causing these errors are:

• A host you are trying to deploy to is prompting you to confirm it’s ssh identify because you haven’t yet (and switchtower is choking on this)
• The PATH of the user you are deploying as on a remote server doesn’t have ruby in it’s path.

You can correct these problems by:

• Connect via SSH once manually to each server you are deploying to—which will add the remote host to your local list of allowed hosts, removing the prompting that breaks ST.
• Change the first line in each of the script/process scripts to be the direct path to ruby on the deployment servers. Alternately, you could add the path to ruby to the user’s environment PATH on the remote server—but I think putting it directly in the script/process files is better since cron jobs don’t have PATH info and you could conceivably run those (especially the spinner) from a cron task.

Enjoy your deploying!