Capistrano

Once installed, Capistrano gives you a cap tool to perform your deployments from the comfort of your command line. When you run cap , Capistrano dutifully connects to your server(s) via SSH and executes the steps necessary to deploy your project. You can define those steps yourself by writing Rake tasks, or by using pre-built task libraries provided by the Capistrano community. There are many ways to automate deployments, from simple rsync bash scripts to complex containerized toolchains. Capistrano sits somewhere in the middle: it automates what you already know how to do manually with SSH, but in a repeatable, scalable fashion. There is no magic here! Capistrano defines a standard deployment process that all Capistrano-enabled projects follow by default. You don't have to decide how to structure your scripts, where deployed files should be placed on the server, or how to perform common tasks: Capistrano has done this work for you. Deploying to a fleet of app servers? Capistrano can run each deployment task concurrently across those servers and uses connection pooling for speed. Your application may need many different types of servers: a database server, an app server, two web servers, and a job queue work server, for example. Capistrano lets you tag each server with one or more roles, so you can control what tasks are executed where. Capistrano is easily extensible using the rubygems package manager. Deploying a Rails app? Wordpress? Laravel? Chances are, someone has already written Capistrano tasks for your framework of choice and has distributed it as a gem. Many Ruby projects also come with Capistrano tasks built-in. Everything in Capistrano comes down to running SSH commands on remote servers. On the one hand, that makes Capistrano simple. On the other hand, if you aren't comfortable SSH-ing into a Linux box and doing stuff on the command-line, then Capistrano is probably not for you. While Capistrano ships with a strong set of conventions that are common for all types of deployments, it needs help understanding the specifics of your project, and there are some things Capistrano is not suited to do. Capistrano depends on connecting to your server(s) with SSH using key-based (i.e. password-less) authentication. You'll need this working before you can use Capistrano. Likewise, your server(s) will likely need supporting software installed before you can perform a deployment. Capistrano itself has no requirements other than SSH, but your application probably needs database software, a web server like Apache or Nginx, and a language runtime like Java, Ruby, or PHP. These server provisioning steps are not done by Capistrano. Capistrano is designed to deploy using a single, non-privileged SSH user, using a non-interactive SSH session. If your deployment requires sudo , interactive prompts, authenticating as one user but running commands as another, you can probably accomplish this with Capistrano, but it may be difficult. Your automated deployments will be much smoother if you can avoid such requirements. Capistrano 3 expects a POSIX shell like Bash or Sh. Shells like tcsh, csh, and such may work, but probably will not. Make sure your project doesn't already have a "Capfile" or "capfile" present. Then run: Note that the files that Capistrano creates are simply templates to get you started. Make sure to edit the deploy.rb and stage files so that they contain values appropriate for your project and your target servers. Capistrano is a large project encompassing multiple GitHub repositories and a community of plugins, and it can be overwhelming when you are just getting started. Here are resources that can help: GitHub issues are for bug reports and feature requests. Please refer to the CONTRIBUTING document for guidelines on submitting GitHub issues. Contributions to Capistrano, in the form of code, documentation or idea, are gladly accepted. Read the DEVELOPMENT document to learn how to hack on Capistrano's cod