Overview
There are a couple common deployment routes:
- Build the app locally and copy it to the server.
- On the server, pull the updated code, build it, and run it.
- Use Heroku to manage deployment.
The command line sessions demonstrate interactive deployment; typically in production a tool would be used for daemonizing the web server. Some common tools are:
Build locally
Revel apps may be deployed to machines that do not have a functioning Go
installation. The command line tool provides the package command
which compiles and zips the app, along with a script to run it.
# Run and test my app.
$ revel run import/path/to/app
.. test app ..
# Package it up.
$ revel package import/path/to/app
Your archive is ready: app.tar.gz
# Copy to the target machine.
$ scp app.tar.gz target:/srv/
# Run it on the target machine.
$ ssh target
$ cd /srv/
$ tar xzvf app.tar.gz
$ bash run.sh
This only works if you develop and deploy to the same architecture, or if you configure your go installation to build to the desired architecture by default. See below for cross-compilation support.
Incremental deployment
Since a statically-linked binary with a full set of assets can grow to be quite large, incremental deployment is supported.
# Build the app into a temp directory
$ revel build import/path/to/app /tmp/app
# Rsync that directory into the home directory on the server
$ rsync -vaz --rsh="ssh" /tmp/app server
# Connect to server and restart the app.
...
Rsync has full support for copying over ssh. For example, here’s a more complicated connection.
# A more complicated example using custom certificate, login name, and target directory
$ rsync -vaz --rsh="ssh -i .ssh/go.pem" /tmp/myapp2 ubuntu@ec2-50-16-80-4.compute-1.amazonaws.com:~/rsync
Build on the server
This method relies on your version control system to distribute updates. It requires your server to have a Go installation. In return, it allows you to avoid potentially having to cross-compile.
$ ssh server
... install go ...
... configure your app repository ...
# Move to the app directory (in your GOPATH), pull updates, and run the server.
$ cd gocode/src/import/path/to/app
$ git pull
$ revel run import/path/to/app prod
Heroku
Revel maintains a Heroku Buildpack, allowing one-command deploys.
- Visit heroku-buildpack-go-revel on github
- See the README for usage instructions.
Boxfuse and Amazon Web Services
Boxfuse comes with first-class support for Revel apps with one-command deploys to AWS.
- Visit the Get Started with Boxfuse and Revel guide to be up and running on AWS in minutes
- See the Boxfuse Revel reference documentation for details.
Cross-compilation
In order to create a cross-compile environment, you need to build go from source. See Installing Go from source for more information. You must properly set your $PATH and $GOPATH variables, otherwise if there is an existing binary Go package, you will get into serious errors.
When you have a go compiler successfully setup, build the cross-compiler by specifying the target environment with GOOS and GOARCH environment variables. See Optional environment variables for more information.
$ cd /path/to/goroot/src
$ GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 ./make.bash --no-clean
$ GOOS=windows GOARCH=386 ./make.bash --no-clean
Install revel on the new environment and you are set to go with the packaging.
$ GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 revel package import/path/to/app
Copy the resulting tarball to your target platform.