deploy a rails app with capistrano without a rails environment

Question

I've been working on a rails project for a client that isn't technical. However, they want me to send over a deployment script, which their networks guys will use to deploy the application.

I've been using capistrano. But the problem is, cap is heavily dependent on the app itself. What i need is a script, that'd use the cap and config/deploy.rb but needs minimal setup on their local systems. The repo in the backbone is git based.

If this cant be achieved by capistrano, anyone knows of any other deployment utilities, that'd allow me stuff cap does and works independently? .. (i create symlinks and run some rake tasks in my :after_update block).

Thanks, Hassan

Answer 1

If setting up a ruby environment to run cap deploy is not something that the "network guys" will be willing to do, then you're in for quite an uphill battle. Some suggestions to help alleviate this:

• Have them use the railsready script to set up their environment
• Give them a virtual machine (maybe a Vagrant box?) that can be used to deploy the instance
• If you're doing a git-based deploy, you'll either have to set up a deployer key (and give this to them) or add them to your github project (assuming you're using github)
• Consider bundling up the entire project and delivering as a tarball (or putting it into an rpm) and having them deploy this way (a quick&dirty way to do this is to deploy to a machine running the same distro as production, and tarring up the deployment directory)
• Consider using a stack that more aligns with their network stack, like JRuby and warbler for deploying to Tomcat
• Do some pair programming or at least screen sharing for the initial install. Sometimes the difference between loving and hating a platform comes down to the availability of help when problems arise.

Answer 2

Mina is like Capistrano but doesn't rely on being inside the rails application directory.

Answer 3

One option could be to setup something like Jenkins that will use capistrano to deploy. And your client can curl the jenkins build url to trigger a deploy.