Deploying with Capistrano

The Assembla Build Agent currently uses Capistrano for deployment. Here are steps to configure an application for deploying with Capistrano and Build Tool:

1. Capify your project
2. Set your Capistrano configuration variables in config/deploy.rb:

• host – set to “localhost”, otherwise the system will try to deploy your application to another server.
• user – set to the login of the user that will run the build (our preconfigured images have a “deploy” userid for this purpose)
• repository – set to the address of the repository containing application sources (eg. set :repository, "git://git.assembla.com/myspace.git")
• application – set to the application name
• scm – possible values are :git or :svn
• deploy_to – set to the path where the application should be deployed to (remember that deploy user should have write permission to this folder). By default Capistrano will deploy to /u/apps/#{application}, however our implementation deploys to /opt/apps.
• use_sudo – you may need to set this to false
• app, web, db – You may also need to add the hostname of your build server to these or other role statements.

Some Capistrano configuration variables can be retrieved from the environment; just remember to load the configuration file of the project before this in the script that will run Capistrano tasks:

• repository – set :repository, ENV['SCM_URL']
• application – set :application, ENV['PROJECT_NAME']
• scm – set :repository, ENV['SCM']

If you want to use same Capistrano config for stage and for production by example, where you may have different host, user, deploy_to or other settings, you may use ENV[‘STAGE’] variable to identify which target is running now, by example:

if ENV['STAGE']
  #. stage options 
  set :host, "localhost"
  set :user, "deploy"
  set :deploy_to, "/opt/apps/#{application}"
else
  #. production options
  set :host, "my.production.host"
  set :user, "root"
end