Introductory Demo Video

The video below was filmed on Mac OSX 10.8 using a more-or-less standard shell without much previous setup.

It covers using Capistrano to install an example Rails project on a previously unprepared server, covering all aspects of Github access, as well as privisioning the server using Chef Solo and Capistrano with Rake.

 Show Notes

The Chef Solo recipes can be reached at [this repository at Github][capistrano-chef-solo-example-recipes], they rely on a fairly new version of Chef Solo, spefically any including the results of this ticket. The aforementioned Chef issue adds environment support to Chef Solo.

The provisioning can also be done using any other mechanism, it's generally accepted however that there's not much point in automising your deploys, unless you are also automating provisioning of your servers for a known, consistent state.

Using sudo with any deployment can be tricky, so it's better to avoid it. Rebooting services without sudo is typically the first place people run into trouble using Capistrano. The trouble shooting page for sudo problems may help.

Note: Some long sequences have been shortened (nobody needs to sit and watch me sitting and watching Ruby compile, for example!)