OpsWorks / Chef PHP deploy process - php

Question

I'm having some serious frustration getting a simple PHP application to deploy reliably using OpsWorks, I can't find any documentation of how the srv/www/app-name/releases directory is managed, but I think that may been the cause of my current problem.
I'm deploying a Laravel application, so I need two things to happen with chef recipes on deploy: composer install, and some directories to be made writable. Composer does seem to be installing fine, but my recipe to create & chmod the directories seems to happen to the previous release - which makes no sense to me at all.
Install composer:
node[:deploy].each do |application, deploy|
script "composer-install" do
interpreter "bash"
cwd "#{deploy[:deploy_to]}/current"
user "root"
code <<-EOH
composer install
EOH
end
end
This works fine, I can refresh the vendor directory as this runs see the dependencies appearing. But the next recipe to run:
node[:deploy].each do |application, deploy|
Chef::Log.info("Application path: #{deploy[:deploy_to]}");
node['directories'].each do |path|
# Get the path we need
new_path = "#{deploy[:deploy_to]}/current/"+path
Chef::Log.info("Checking directory: "+new_path);
# Ensure the dir exists
unless File.exists?(new_path)
Chef::Log.info("Creating directory: "+new_path);
Dir.mkdir( new_path, 777 )
end
# Ensure its writable
File.chmod( 777, new_path )
end
end
The content from Chef::log does appear in the log, there are no errors, but the directories are simply not there - they are created in the PREVIOUS release/timestamp directory, as if the 'current' symlink has reverted back for the duration of this recipe. They are also created with permissions '411'.
Can anyone explain where I'm going wrong here?
Can I access the new directory path instead of using the 'current' symlink?

Answer 1

What is very likely happening is that you're applying these two specified recipes at different stages of the deployment. Since you're using Current - it will be at one stage the old directory, while checking out the next part of the application.
What you should be maybe doing instead is :
use the "#{release_path}" variable in your recipes to generate build specific files/events in your app.
use the deploy/before_restart.rb file to execute some symlinks that provide the files at a predictable location
If you provide screenshot of the recipes that are being called and on what layer from the layer edit view, it will help people here to see what is happening and give you a better feedback.