Question

When I cap deploy my Symfony2 project, then log into my server I see that the the dev (app_dev.php) runs ok but the prod version (app.php) does not.

The error is

[Tue Jan 03 14:31:48 2012] [error] [client xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught exception 'RuntimeException' with message 'Failed to write cache file "/var/www/example/prod/releases/20120103202539/app/cache/prod/classes.php".' in /var/www/example/prod/releases/20120103202539/app/bootstrap.php.cache:1079\nStack trace:\n#0 /var/www/example/prod/releases/20120103202539/app/bootstrap.php.cache(1017): Symfony\\Component\\ClassLoader\\ClassCollectionLoader::writeCacheFile('/var/www/example/p...', '<?php  ????name...')\n#1 /var/www/example/prod/releases/20120103202539/app/bootstrap.php.cache(682): Symfony\\Component\\ClassLoader\\ClassCollectionLoader::load(Array, '/var/www/example/p...', 'classes', false, false, '.php')\n#2 /var/www/example/prod/releases/20120103202539/web/app.php(10): Symfony\\Component\\HttpKernel\\Kernel->loadClassCache()\n#3 {main}\n  thrown in /var/www/example/prod/releases/20120103202539/app/bootstrap.php.cache on line 1079

Looking at the recently deployed cache directory I see:

drwxrwxrwx 4 root     root     4096 Jan  3 14:28 .
drwxrwxr-x 5 root     root     4096 Jan  3 14:28 ..
drwxr-xr-x 6 www-data www-data 4096 Jan  3 14:28 dev
drwxrwxr-x 7 root     root     4096 Jan  3 14:28 prod

I can fix the issue with chown -R www-data.www-data prod/ but I wondered if I can stop this from happening in the first place? And why do the directories have different owners?

Answer 1

This happens because your web-server is running by user, who is not able to write to just created cache/prod directory.

There are two solutions, which I know and use. First, add extra commands to run after deployment to Capfile. Capfile will like this:

load 'deploy' if respond_to?(:namespace) # cap2 differentiator
Dir['vendor/bundles/*/*/recipes/*.rb'].each { |bundle| load(bundle) }
load Gem.find_files('symfony2.rb').last.to_s

after "deploy:finalize_update" do
  run "sudo chown -R www-data:www-data #{latest_release}/#{cache_path}"
  run "sudo chown -R www-data:www-data #{latest_release}/#{log_path}"
  run "sudo chmod -R 777 #{latest_release}/#{cache_path}"
end

load 'app/config/deploy'

Second solution is more elegant. You specify correct user, who can write to cache in deploy.rb and make sure that you don’t use sudo:

set :user, "anton"
set :use_sudo, false