Capistrano is a utility for executing tasks in parallel across
multiple remote hosts. It was formerly known as SwitchTower.
Installation:
gem install capistrano
Manual:
http://manuals.rubyonrails.org/read/book/17
Version 1.1 introduces a few changes:
-
Renamed! Due to the trademark infringement debacle of last week, we
had to change the name. Moving forward it will be known as Capistrano. -
The generated capistrano.rake file is simpler now than it used to
be. You can easily append custom options to individual tasks now. For
instance, if you want the deploy to be silent, instead of verbose,
just add “-q” to the parameter list for that task. -
The generated capistrano.rake file uses the “remote” namespace, so
you’ll need to have at least Rake 0.7.0. You can still do “rake
deploy” and “rake rollback”, but the other tasks must be prefixed
with the namespace (“rake remote:exec”, “rake remote:show_tasks”, etc.) -
The ‘switchtower’ command is replaced by the ‘cap’ command.
-
The cap utility is verbose by default. If you want it to be silent,
use the -q option. If you want it to be less verbose, you can specify
the -v or -vv flags explicitly. -
The cap utility uses more rake-like command-line semantics. Instead
of needing to do “cap -r config/deploy -a deploy”, you can just do
“cap deploy”. It will look for config/deploy.rb, capfile, or Capfile
automatically, and will treat raw parameters as action names.
Upgrading/switching from SwitchTower to Capistrano is a little
inconvenient. Here’s what you’ll need to do:
- gem uninstall switchtower (remove all versions)
- gem install capistrano
- For each of your Rails projects, do “cap -A .”, keeping your
existing deploy.rb - For each of your Rails projects, remove lib/tasks/switchtower.rake
Enjoy!
- Jamis