Mission Capistrano: Accomplished

A couple of weeks ago, I accepted “Mission Capistrano” to automate the deployment process. I figure I owe an update: Well, it’s “Mission accomplished!”…all thanks to Capistrano.

(Photo by pasukaru76, Creative Commons license)

Meet Capistrano, my new unpaid and overworked robotic intern. Today, instead of dealing through multiple tedious steps, I simply type:

cap deploy

and Capistrano automatically takes care of the dirty work. What used to take 15 minutes now takes less than 4 seconds.

Here’s my 8-line configuration file…feel free to use it as a starting point for your projects:

set :application,  "kinetic"
set :repository,   "."
set :scm,          :none
set :deploy_via,   :copy
set :copy_exclude, [".DS_Store", "vendor"]
set :deploy_to,    "/home/kinetic/kineticdiagrams.com/"
set :user,         "kinetic"
role :app,         "kineticdiagrams.com"

With Capistrano, I can painlessly to deploy to multiple servers in parallel. And my favorite feature is that I can roll-back to any previously-deployed version. Let’s say I accidentally deploy a bug in my application code and expose my gaffe to the world. With Capistrano, I can easily roll-back to an earlier working version

cap deploy:rollback

and continue with the rest of my day, dignity intact. If only my romantic relationships had a similar “undo” button…