Do you know what code is running on your servers? Perhaps someone deployed something in a weird way and circumvented your normal deploy-logging process. Maybe you suspect an application server didn’t actually restart. Maybe you just want to know quickly because you’re lazy.

My answer to this question has been adding the Git SHA of the currently running code to the HTTP headers of my app. By doing this, figuring out what’s actually running is as simple as a:

curl -I http://www.example.net | grep X-GitSHA

Accomplishing this is pretty simple, first, you’ll want to run and store the output of:

git rev-parse HEAD

in whatever directory your deployed code runs in. This is the fastest, and easiest way to determine the current SHA. In Rails this is easily done in an initializer or application.rb using something like:

GIT_SHA = git rev-parse HEAD .chomp

Then, just make sure the constant gets inserted as a header. Again, in Rails you could do this with a before_filter in controllers/application_controller.rb

headers['X-GitSHA'] = MyApp::Application::GIT_SHA

And you’re done! It should just work. Of course there’s a million ways to actually do this.

Now that you have this info you can see what code is different between what’s deployed and what’s on say your master branch with a git diff :

PROD_SHA= curl -I http://www.example.net | grep X-GitSHA | cut -d’:’ -f2 git diff $PROD_SHA...master

Or, you can see what the difference is in terms of commits messages rather than actual lines changed with git show-branch

PROD_SHA= curl -I http://www.example.net | grep X-GitSHA | cut -d’:’ -f2 git show-branch $PROD_SHA master

Lastly, if you need the cache on a resource busted between deploys be it in either HTTP or Memcached, having a GIT_SHA constant available in your app makes it pretty easy to do. Note that this isn’t great for a lot of situations where a file may NOT have changed between deploys.