Introduction to Continuous Deployment

CircleCI enables you to automatically deploy after green builds. We have customers deploying to PaaS’s such as Heroku, Engine Yard, Google App Engine and Bluemix, hosted cloud servers (like EC2 and Rackspace), and to private and colo servers—even behind firewalls. Some use tools like Capistrano, Fabric, and Paver.

However you want to deploy your code, CircleCI makes Continuous Deployment easy.

Deployment Syntax

Tell CircleCI about your deployment requirements in the deployment section of your circle.yml file. Within this section, you can can define custom deployment steps for each branch, directing CircleCI to use specific deployment tools or custom scripts. Deployment commands are triggered only after a successful build.

The following example will run the deploy-to-production.sh script when the tests pass on the master branch and run the deploy-to-staging.sh script when the tests pass on the staging branch. If you receive a Permission Denied error, you may need to add executable permissions to the file: chmod +x deploy-to-production.sh

deployment:
  production: # just a label; label names are completely up to you
    branch: master
    commands:
      - ./deploy-to-production.sh
  staging:
    branch: staging
    commands:
      - ./deploy-to-staging.sh

Regular Expressions

You can also use regular expressions in the branch property.

One example is to deploy branches matching a prefix, e.g. “feature-“:

deployment:
  development:
    branch: /feature-.*/  # branches starting with "feature-"
    commands:
      - ./deploy-feature-branch

You could also run deployments for everything but the master branch:

deployment:
  development:
    branch: /^(?!master$).*$/  # not the master branch
    commands:
      - ./deploy-development

Deploy over SSH

First you need to upload your SSH keys from your project’s Project Settings > SSH keys page in the CircleCI UI. CircleCI will automatically add them to the ssh-agent, so they are available for forwarding.

You can list commands or include bash scripts for SSH deployment in the circle.yml file. You can also use tools such as Capistrano or Fabric when deploying to private servers or to EC2, Rackspace, and other cloud hosting providers.

You can use your existing Capistrano recipes, for example:

deployment:
  production:
    branch: master
    commands:
      - bundle exec cap production deploy

Here’s an example using Fabric:

deployment:
  production:
    branch: master
    commands:
      - fab deploy

Deploy to a PaaS

CircleCI has customers deploying to Heroku, Engine Yard, Google App Engine, Elastic Beanstalk, Dot Cloud, Nodejistu and other PaaSes. We have detailed instructions on deployment to Heroku, Google App Engine and Bluemix.