Capistrano - clean up old releases

Question

Usually when using capistrano, I will go and manually delete old releases from a deployed application. I understand that you can run cap deploy:cleanup but that still leaves 5 releases. Is this it's intended purpose? Is there another way to cleanup old releases to just 1 previous deploy?

it's ever a good idea to keep some previous releases, then if you last deploy contains a big mistake you can fast rollback with capistrano (cap deploy:rollback) to the previous release until you fix it. — damoiser, Dec 05 '13 at 12:00

score 155 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 01 '15 at 06:44

155

You can use the :keep_releases variable to override the default of 5. Check this out.

edited Jun 01 '15 at 06:44

Sharvy Ahmed

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answered Jan 23 '10 at 04:32

jcrossley3

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May be worth noting that even if the find+rm command fails to remove some files the task seems to silently "succeed" when called via the `after` hook. Calling it directly shows the errors... I realized this when I was starting to run out of disk space. – conny Jul 14 '10 at 10:48
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@Josh You accepted this answer, but you should check if you have set the callback for "deploy:cleanup" as I said below, since it don't run by default. – Diego Plentz May 31 '12 at 00:39

Diego Plentz · Answer 2 · 2016-03-09T03:00:17.320

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You could do this automatically by setting this in your deploy.rb

set :keep_releases, 1
after "deploy:update", "deploy:cleanup"

In the past(I don't know exactly which version) this callback was the default, but later the developer decided to leave it to the user to decide. In capistrano 3 it was added back to the default deploy flow.

edited Mar 09 '16 at 03:00

answered Mar 05 '12 at 12:51

Diego Plentz

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Thank you, Diego. Your answer works correctly in Capistrano v2.14.1. – scarver2 Jan 30 '13 at 16:28
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Looks like [Capistrano 3 calls `deploy:cleanup` as part of the deploy flow](https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano/blob/690afc0c5c3c43d2920b0bfdeb9323c286b12106/lib/capistrano/tasks/deploy.rake#L23). – Dennis Oct 13 '15 at 13:10

score 42 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 05 '13 at 01:38

42

If you want to delete all releases except the last 3 for example you can run:

cap deploy:cleanup -s keep_releases=3

answered Feb 05 '13 at 01:38

jesse cai

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Doesn't work. `optionParser::InvalidOption: invalid option: s` – Snowman Jan 21 '17 at 22:34

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered May 23 '17 at 10:10

I had a similar problem. I wanted to keep the 5 releases for normal deployments but needed for certain situations to be able to remove all previous releases.

I was able to do this with a custom task. Create a file lib/capistrano/tasks/cleanup.rake and add the following code.

desc "Remove all but the last release"
task :cleanup_all do
    set :keep_releases, 1
    invoke "deploy:cleanup"
end

To run use bundle exec cap staging cleanup_all or cap staging cleanup_all

Capistrano - clean up old releases

4 Answers4