• Understand what Capistrano does
• Understand the differences between Capistrano and rake
• Understand multi-stage deployment
• Understand the differences between Rails environments and Capistrano deployment targets
• Understand "roles" in Capistrano configuration
• Understand how to make Capistrano do something custom during deploy
  • We make database dumps on every deploy. How do we do that?
  • We show the total size of the dumps on every deploy. How do we do that?
• Understand the Capistrano directory structure on a target host
• Very few projects still use Capistrano 2. The main difference to Capistrano 3 is that the deploy tasks does not run migrations. You need to use deploy:migrations to deploy and migrate.

Resources

• Capistrano's own Readme Archive
• Directory structure on the remote server Archive
• Configuration Archive (only skim through the details)
• Deploy flow Archive
• Hooks Archive
• Debugging a failed deployment
• Daniel's Master Thesis (2.3 Deployment der Anwendung)

Exercises

• In one of our projects, look at config/deploy.rb and the config/deploy directory. Get a rough understanding what those files do.
• Get an operations engineer to help you deploy MovieDB to http://moviedb-yourname.makandra.de/ Archive using Capistrano.
  • Please tell the operations engineer to set up Redis on your staging deploy, you will need it at a later stage of the curriculum.
• SSH to your new deployment. Open a shell to the application directory, look around and understand the directory structure.