Sickpea

Capistrano. Love it or hate it, many people use it. And once you get it configured, it works fairly well. I just finished up a long overdue refactoring of an old deploy.rb file, one we've been happily treating as a blackbox for years, mostly due to its unnecessary complexity. I'll take the blame. The road to maintenance hell is filled with good intentions.

First I threw away all the one-off tasks that we never used or never worked quite right: watching God / Nginx logs, reloading configs, starting, stopping, restarting, and checking statuses. You get the idea. The important ones are handled by deploy:restart and its brethren, the rest are easily accomplished with cap invoke COMMAND="foobar".

Next, all our twisted callback dependency trees got the axe. Now there's a single hook that's called after deploy:update_code to swap in some production configuration files, install any required gems, and optimize assets. Similarly, an after deploy:setup hook takes care of setting up all directories and configuration files in a single, easy-to-read, block of code.

Finally, I wanted to hide many of the default Capistrano tasks that just seem to confuse new developers. Explaining the difference between deploy, deploy:migrate, deploy:migrations, deploy:update, and deploy:update_code gets tiring. Mostly because I forget myself after a while. Just use deploy (which in our case triggers migrations). This little hack at the bottom of deploy.rb keeps it simple*:

config/deploy.rb

%w{ deploy:migrate deploy:update deploy:update_code ... }.each do |name|
  find_task(name).instance_variable_get(:@desc).insert(0, '[internal]')
end

Now cap -T is short and sweet, and you can always do Cap -vT to see everything. If you're interested, sickpea.com's deploy.rb is available as a gist on Github.