This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Guy Naor. Original Post: Deploying to Staging and Production with Capistrano Feed Title: Famundo - The Dev Blog Feed URL: http://devblog.famundo.com/xml/rss/feed.xml Feed Description: A blog describing the development and related technologies involved in creating famundo.com - a family management sytem written using Ruby On Rails and postgres Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Guy Naor Latest Posts From Famundo - The Dev Blog

After an application is released, deployment should be in stages. To a test server, a staging server and a production one. I hope you have a staging server...

But capistrano has no knowledge of the difference between a staging and a production server. To make it easy to deploy using capistrano, a small change is needed to deploy.rb.

We add an if statement based off of an environment variable, and with it select the servers to deploy to. I also use this same variable to protect my production servers from accidental data changes, by adding an if to all data altering recipies I use only in staging (like reloading the DB and such). This way there's no way to run those commands on the production server.

Now, to deploy on staging: env DEPLOY='STAGING' cap deploy

And on production: env DEPLOY='PRODUCTION' cap deploy

Here's a small snippet of code with the change:

if ENV['DEPLOY'] == 'PRODUCTION'
   puts "*** Deploying to the \033[1;41m  PRODUCTION  \033[0m servers!"
   role :web, "www.your.domain.com"
   role :app, "app.your.domain.com
   role :db,  "db.your.domain.com", :primary => true
else
   puts "*** Deploying to the \033[1;42m  STAGING  \033[0m server!"
   role :web, "www.staging.domain.com"
   role :app, "app.staging.domain.com
   role :db,  "db.staging.domain.com", :primary => true
end