Piotr Murach - Working with Capistrano: Tasks, Roles, and Variables

Capistrano is a great tool for automating the deployment and maintenance of web applications. I use it to deploy Ruby on Rails and other Rack-based applications. It takes care of all the tedious bits such as installing dependencies, compiling assets or migrating database schemas. The alternative would be to manually log into a server via SSH and run all the necessary commands ourselves. This would open a path to terrible sins and consume a lot of time and patience. Thankfully we don’t have to.The modular design of Capistrano means that there are plenty of plugins and scripts available. They will make even the thorniest deployment needs possible. Even if you don’t find what you want off the shelf, Capistrano flexible nature will help you write easily your own tasks. You will be able to tell Capistrano exactly how you want your deployment to look like. It will then prepare the server and continue to help you maintain updates to your application.