Capistrano

What do you like best?

Capistrano is simple, Ruby based, supports automated deployment with various custom settings.

I can use Capistrano as a gem in my Ruby on Rails application and with a generator command it generated Capfile and deploy.rb where we can write various useful scripts used for deployment.

Another best part is we can able to write post deployment script like update database migrations, bundled gems or even write rake tasks if there any.

One can able to set multiple environments like staging, productions, etc.

You can keep multiple backup of multiple releases the default is 5.

It always deploy from the source control repository.

Ability to touch tmp/restart.txt on deploy which trigger a passenger reload.

There is a feature to pass authentication on server before deployment.

There is a feature to rollback to previous deployment version.

You can SSH to many servers and perform bunch of actions.

What do you dislike?

I like Capistrano so I am using since 2013.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

If you are deploying web applications using few setups with few deployment commands Capistrano is the right choice for you.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Basically I am facing many issues while deploying my web applications to server. Some issues are like I many have many environments and server instances and with one click it was not possible to deploy the application and Capistrano helps me deploy on many instances and environments with single command.

It helped me rollback to previous version whenever I deployed irrelevant code to server.

Many times I many need various versions of deployment applications and Capistrano helps me keeping many releases of deployed applications.

When my web application is ready with some sort of database scripts need to be updated on server, in such a case Capistrano helps me set the database migrations scripts after post deployment.

Capistrano also helps me to write many post deployment scripts like running bundle install command when there are any addition or removable of Gems, or when we write any rake tasks, etc.

I have realized that Capistrano is one of the best tool which is used for the deployment.