taco

a modular deployment system for unix

about

taco is a set of compatible command line tools for packaging, building and deploying programs.

eventually this repository will house a higher level CLI tool, taco, but for now it is just documentation for the individual taco components

the taco philosophy is:

• use tarballs to package programs
• use separate, well defined tools for transforming or deploying tarballs (do one thing well)
• use unix principles so tools compose nicely (e.g. taco-pack . | ssh myserver taco-build "npm install" )
• make it easy for users to customize their deploy pipelines and implement their own tools

components

each of these is a separate module. you can use them all, or use the ones you like and write your own missing components.

• taco-pack - creates tarball of a program
• taco-build - takes a tarball, runs a build script inside it, and outputs a tarball
• taco-mon - deploys your program and runs it with the mon process monitor
• taco-nginx - updates nginx configuration to route <package.json name>.* subdomain traffic to your program, then starts your programs process

if you write a new tool that works well with the taco stack, publish it to npm as taco-<name> and send us a pull request adding it to this list. we also encourage you to open an issue with your idea first to get feedback from the taco community before implementing.

examples of other tools that could be written are taco-docker, taco-upstart, or taco-torrent.

example

on client:

make sure your program has a package.json with a name and a start script.

{
  "name": "my-cool-server",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node server.js"
  }
}

then you just pack up your program and pipe the tarball to your server somehow.

here we are using webcat but you can use ssh, rsync, scp, etc:

$ taco-pack . | webcat maxogden

on server:

$ webcat maxogden | taco-build "npm install --production" | taco-mon deploy .

here is the full output of deploying hello-world-server locally:

~/taco 🐈  taco-pack ~/src/js/hello-world-server > server.tar
~/taco 🐈  taco-build "npm install --production" < server.tar > server-built.tar
hat@0.0.3 node_modules/hat
~/taco 🐈  ls -alh *.tar
-rw-r--r--  1 maxogden  staff    21K Apr 20 10:37 server-built.tar
-rw-r--r--  1 maxogden  staff   4.5K Apr 20 10:37 server.tar
~/taco 🐈  taco-mon deploy . < server-built.tar
Finished deploying
~/taco 🐈  taco-mon status
hello-world-server: alive, started just now
~/taco 🐈  tree -L 3
.
├── deploys
│   └── hello-world-server -> ../versions/hello-world-server-1429551456725
├── server-built.tar
├── server.tar
└── versions
    └── hello-world-server-1429551456725
        ├── index.js
        ├── node_modules
        ├── package.json
        ├── readme.md
        ├── taco.log
        ├── taco.mon.pid
        └── taco.pid

5 directories, 8 files

folder structure

taco deployment modules, such as taco-mon, should use the following folder structure:

versions/
  myapp-1429547612075/
    myapp.pid         # \
    myapp.stderr.log  #  - pids and logs created by taco-mon
    myapp.stdout.log  # /
    package.json # from tarball, must exist for process to be deployable
    # ... and the rest of the process files from the tarball are here too
deployed/
  myapp/ -> ../builds/myapp-1429547612075/ # symlink