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Basic Tips and Tricks for Capistrano 2

April 22, 2008 at 11:55

Capistrano can be tricky sometimes and it is very time consuming to find the solution. Here are some things I have always at hand, when something doesn’t work with Capistrano:

1. Code (ruby)

   1. require ‘mongrel_cluster/recipes’

   I found this by chance. Mongrel Cluster has some default recipes, tasks you can use to stop, restart your remote Mongrel Processes, just add the line above to your code.

2. Code (ruby)

   1. set :checkout, "export"

   To avoid that capistrano only checks out your rails project and also puts the .svn files in your production environment you can add this line to the deploy.rb - an export disconnects the project files from the repository (removes .svn folders).

3. I’m using ssh and so every checkout from my repository is with svn+ssh. But I had problems doing this with Capistrano, so I read about a nice way to get svn+ssh to work with Capistrano. All you have to do is generate a public key file for your user you created to checkout the files from the repository. Create the public keyfile for this user without a password on the server where your repository lies, then copy the key file to your own pc/mac and add the path to this key to your config file in the .subversion folder. The .subversion Folder is inside your home directory. Additional help here.
   Code (txt)

   1. ssh = $SVN_SSH ssh -l dboek -i /Users/dboek/dboek_railsdev

   “dboek” is my username for the remote folder, “/Users/dboek/dboek_railsdev” is the path to my key file on windows you will have to write something like “c:/secret/my_server.key”.
   Everytime a program is using ssh and tries to connect to your server it will be given the key file and on this way there will be no problems with a username and password combination in Capistrano.

4. For Mac Users: I had the problem that Capistrano won’t run correctly, it had problems working with ssh: After an hour of searching I found a solution, just switch your command line shell:
   Code (shell)

   1. ssh-agent bash
   2. ssh-add

   This will switch your command line to bash and add ssh functionality, afterwards everthing worked perfectly well.

5. If you have problems running Capistrano with Windows, also take a look at Jamis Blog, he explains it more in detail there
   Code (ruby)

   1. default_run_options[:pty] = true