Geordi now has a script that runs capistrano with all known deploy targets (i.e. staging, production...).

Use with

geordi capistrano deploy:migrations

or

geordi capistrano deploy

The abbrevation geordi cap ... works as well.

The way MySQL's FULLTEXT tokenizer splits text into word tokens might not always be what you need. E.g. it splits a word at period characters.

Since the tokenizer has near-zero configuration options (minimum word length and stopwords list), you need to hack it. There are three options available.

Option 1: If you like pain

Write a Full-Text parser plugin in C.

Option 2: Make the problem go away

Normaliz...

Our old solution for cronjobs, the "craken" plugin, is no longer maintained and does not work on Rails 3.2+.

We will instead use the whenever gem.

"Whenever" works just like "craken", by putting your rake tasks into the server's cron table. Everything seems to work just like we need it.

Installation for new projects

1. Add "whenever" to your Gemfile:

    group :deploy do
      gem 'whenever', require: false
    end
   

2. Add it to your config/deploy.rb:
   ...

When deploying, Capistrano puts a REVISION file into your application's release directory. It contains the hash of the commit which was deployed.

If you want to know the currently deployed release, simply SSH to a server and view that file.

$ cat /var/www/my-project/current/REVISION
cf8734ece3938fc67262ad5e0d4336f820689307

Capistrano task

When your application is deployed to multiple servers, you probably want to see a result for all of them.
Here is a Capistrano task that checks all servers with the :app role.

If you upgrade to the mysql2 gem, you will run into the problem that the server's database.yml (which is usually not under version control) needs to change exactly on deploy.

You can however make your database.yml work for mysql and mysql2 at the same time. Simpy do this

production:
   adapter: <%= defined?(Mysql2) ? 'mysql2' : 'mysql' %>
   #...

The problem

When using the asset pipeline your assets (images, javascripts, stylesheets, fonts) live in folders inside app:

app/assets/fonts
app/assets/images
app/assets/javascripts
app/assets/stylesheets

With the asset pipeline, you can use the full power of Ruby to generate assets. E.g. you can have ERB tags in your Javascript. Or you can have an ERB template which generates Haml which generates HTML. You can chain as many preprocessors as you want.

When you deploy, Rails runs assets:precompile...

There is a conflict between current capistrano versions and the 2.5.1 net-ssh gem. Make sure you upgrade to 2.5.2, then it should work again.

Capistrano recently had some API changes that can results in deploys not working when running with old deploy.rb files.

So let's bundle it. Put capistrano into your Gemfile, like this:

# Gemfile

group :deploy do
  gem 'capistrano'
  gem 'capistrano_colors'
end

It's possible you need to do a bundle update net-ssh to get things running.

Now double check that all your custom hooks are actually still called. One candidate might be an after deploy:symlink hook that has been renamed into `after deploy:creat...

I got these warnings while deploying a Rails 3.2 app with asset pipeline enabled:

*** [err :: host.tld] find: `/opt/www/hollyapp.com/releases/20120503115342/public/images': No such file or directory
*** [err :: host.tld] find: `/opt/www/hollyapp.com/releases/20120503115342/public/stylesheets': No such file or directory
*** [err :: host.tld] find: `/opt/www/hollyapp.com/releases/20120503115342/public/javascripts': No such file or directory

Folders like public/javascripts might not exist if you're using the asset pipeline (...

Geordi, our collection of command line tools, has been extended by another command deploy-to-production. This script encapsulates the following workflow:

• Pull the production branch.
• Show which commits from the master would make it to production with this deploy.
• Ask if you want to proceed.
• If yes, merge the master into the production branch, push and deploy with bundle exec cap production deploy:migrations

The script will ask you for the names of your master branch, production branch an...

Note: This process is tailored to our specific needs and tools at makandra. While it will certainly not apply to all (especially larger teams), we think it is a helpful starting point. Compare also the Gatekeeping: Guide for gatekeeper card.

In order to reduce the number of rejects we get from clients, we want to review all code written before it goes to the staging server.

If your project manager wants to do gatekeeping o...

Note: This process is tailored to our specific needs and tools at makandra. While it will certainly not apply to all (especially larger teams), we think it is a helpful starting point.

In order to reduce the number of rejects we get from clients, we want to review all code written before it goes to the staging server.

If you're responsible for gatekeeping in a projects, this is what to do:

First, read the [Gatekeeping for developers](https://makandracards.com/makandra/6579-gatekeeping-guide-for-develope...

When deploying code with Capistrano (depending on your configuration) at some point Capistrano tries to check out code from your repository. In order to do so, Capistrano connects to your repository server from the application server you're deploying to with SSH. For this connection you can use two SSH keys:

• the user's ~/.ssh/id_rsa [default]
• the very same key you used for connecting to the application server - forwarded automatically to the git repository.

If you prefer the second way, add this to deploy.rb:

ssh_options[:forwar...

Removing features and merging those changes back can be painful. Here is how it worked for me.\
tl;dr: Before merging back: reinstate reverted features in a temporary branch, then merge that branch.

Scenario

Consider your team has been working on several features in a branch, made many changes over time and thus several commits for each feature.\
Now your client wants you to deploy while there are still stories that were rejected previously and can't be deployed.
...

If you get this error while deploy and you are sure the Gemfile.lock is in the version control check your releases directory.

This error can occur if someone/something copy a file or directory into your releases directory.

When you have a complex recipe setup with multistage deployment you may run into this error:

`role_list_from': unknown role `something' (ArgumentError)

Consider this task definition:

namespace :foo do
  task :bar, :roles => :something do
    # do crazy stuff
  end
end

Whenever we call foo.bar in our recipe, Capistrano will fail if you deploy to a stage where none of the servers has the role the error complains about, "something" in this case.

However, you can [hack around it](http://groups.google.com/group/ca...

We forked craken today and fixed one of the issues we had with new (>0.8.7) rake versions.

The craken:install rake task raised a "can't convert Hash into String" error e.g. while deploying with Capistrano.

https://github.com/makandra/craken

Whenever you deploy using Capistrano, a new folder is created within the releases directory on the remote server containing the application code.

By default Capistrano 3 keeps the last 5 releases in case you need to rollback to an older release. You can overwrite this setting by using

set :keep_releases, 3

Attached is a working config to deploy an application with Capistrano that needs to monitor Resque workers with God.

God will run as the deployment user, no need to register it as a system service.

Put this into your config/deploy.rb:

namespace :god do
  def god_is_running
    !capture("#{god_command} status >/dev/null 2>/dev/null || echo 'not running'").start_with?('not running')
  end

  def god_command

...