Preserve Rails Ferret Index with a Symlink and Capistrano

If you're deploying your Rails application with capistrano and using ferret as your app's index, you'll quickly notice that with every deployment/update to your production code will come a ferret index rebuild. Not good.

Luckily, the solution is quite simple.

First, deploy your app and build your index. Once that's done, copy your index folder to the shared folder:

cp -R /path/to/your/app/current/index /path/to/your/app/shared/

Lastly, in your deploy.rb file that you use to control your deployments, tell capistrano to create a symlink to the shared directory for your ferret index:

desc "Preserve ferret index" 
task :after_update_code, :roles => [:web] do
  run <<-EOF
    ln -s #{shared_path}/index #{latest_release}/index
  EOF
end

That's it. Now every time you deploy, your index is the same as it was before. This is great 99% of the time, but don't forget to rebuild your index manually if you modify your indexed data structures.

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