The upcoming Capistrano 2.0 adds some very handy features to this already great tool.
Here’s how to deploy your shiny new Rails app to a web server without access to your subversion repository:
# config/deploy.rb
# deploy by copying a tarball to the remote host
set :deploy_via, :copy
# use export instead of checkout when building the archive
# (this happens on your local machine now):
set :copy_strategy, :export
# uncomment to use zip instead of tar:
# set :copy_compression, :zip
In my experience the ‘argh, no svn’ scenario occurs more often than not when dealing with client’s web servers. Often firewalls prevent connections from the server to outside servers, and/or there is no subversion installed on the machine. For me this new feature alone justifies the upgrade.
