In order to deploy with Ansistrano, you need to perform some steps:

• Create a new hosts file. Check ansible inventory documentation if you need help. This file will identify all the hosts where to deploy to. For multistage environments check Multistage environments.
• Create a new playbook for deploying your app, for example, deploy.yml
• Set up role variables (see Role Variables)
• Include the ansistrano.deploy role as part of a play
• Run the deployment playbook

ansible-playbook -i hosts deploy.yml

If everything has been set up properly, this command will create the following approximate directory structure on your server. Check how the hosts folder structure would look like after one, two and three deployments.

-- /var/www/my-app.com
|-- current -> /var/www/my-app.com/releases/20100509145325
|-- releases
|   |-- 20100509145325
|-- shared

-- /var/www/my-app.com
|-- current -> /var/www/my-app.com/releases/20100509150741
|-- releases
|   |-- 20100509150741
|   |-- 20100509145325
|-- shared

-- /var/www/my-app.com
|-- current -> /var/www/my-app.com/releases/20100512131539
|-- releases
|   |-- 20100512131539
|   |-- 20100509150741
|   |-- 20100509145325
|-- shared

To prevent different timestamps when deploying to several servers using the serial option, you should set the ansistrano_release_version variable.

ansible-playbook -i hosts -e "ansistrano_release_version=`date -u +%Y%m%d%H%M%SZ`" deploy.yml

If you want to deploy to different environments such as devel, preprod and prod, it's recommended to create different hosts files. When done, you can specify a different host file when running the deployment playbook using the -i parameter. On every host file, you can specify different users, password, connection parameters, etc.

ansible-playbook -i hosts_devel deploy.yml

ansible-playbook -i hosts_preprod deploy.yml

ansible-playbook -i hosts_prod deploy.yml

In continuous delivery environments, you will possibly have a high number of releases in production. Maybe you have tons of space and you don't mind, but it's common practice to keep just a custom number of releases.

After the deployment, if you want to remove old releases just set the ansistrano_keep_releases variable to the total number of releases you want to keep.

Let's see three deployments with an ansistrano_keep_releases: 2 configuration:

-- /var/www/my-app.com
|-- current -> /var/www/my-app.com/releases/20100509145325
|-- releases
|   |-- 20100509145325
|-- shared

-- /var/www/my-app.com
|-- current -> /var/www/my-app.com/releases/20100509150741
|-- releases
|   |-- 20100509150741
|   |-- 20100509145325
|-- shared

-- /var/www/my-app.com
|-- current -> /var/www/my-app.com/releases/20100512131539
|-- releases
|   |-- 20100512131539
|   |-- 20100509150741
|-- shared

See how the release 20100509145325 has been removed.