Deployment

It's time for the long overdue final installment of our Capistrano 3 tutorial series. To recap the preceding parts have been:

Part 1

Secure SSH key based website deployment from Subversion using Capistrano 3

Part 2

Using Capistrano 3 for deploying PHP and other none Rails based websites

This installment will provide a more 'real world' example of using Capistrano to deploy a Drupal website. This allows us to illustrate how you might tailor a Capistrano deploy script to your own website.

Welcome to part two in our three part Capistrano 3 tutorial series. If you worked your way through part one then you should be all set to write your first Capistrano deploy script. The deploy script we'll create will be a "bare bones" script which simply moves files from an SVN tag to a folder on your Staging server.

Compared to part one this tutorial instalment is a walk in the park. Enjoy!

Welcome to Part 1 of my Capistrano 3 tutorial series. This post covers installing Capistrano and getting to the point where we can create our first Capistrano deploy scripts.

This will be a techie and complex post as the subject matter is not trivial. I am assuming that you have basic familiarity with Linux and the command line. It will definitely be worth persevering through this tutorial series though as once complete your deployment process will be far easier. This is the hardest part of the tutorial series, it does get easier!

And with that...let's begin.

Over the last few months I wrote an in depth tutorial series on using Capistrano. This covered:

Part 1

What is Capistrano and why is it so good?

Part 2

Secure SSH key based Capistrano website deployment from Subversion for multi-developer teams

Part 3

Using Capistrano for deploying PHP and other none Rails based websites

Part 4

Combining Capistrano and Drush for deploying Drupal powered websites

Unfortunately about two months ago Capistrano version 3 was released which has made my tutorial somewhat redundant. You can't stand in the way of progress though so I've recreated the series for Capistrano 3.

This final instalment builds on what we've run through previously to demonstrate how you can tailor a Capistrano deploy script to fit your application. We've chosen a Drupal website as an example because:

• Drupal is very popular.
• There doesn't seem to be much by way of comprehensive 'how-tos' for combining Capistrano and Drupal.
• We like using Drupal and so we already have a custom deploy script up our sleeves to write about.

Part three of my four part Capistrano series covers adapting the Ruby based Capistrano deployment tool for use with LAMP websites. If you missed the previous instalments of this Capistrano series then you can read parts one and two via our blog. This is a monumentally techie blog post which isn't for the faint hearted!

OK, time for part two in my four part Capistrano series of blog posts. In case you missed it you can find part one here. This is a techie post aimed at experienced website developers so consider yourself forewarned if you read on.

I decided to write this post based on my own experience of trawling Google for help bending Capistrano to my will and finding the lack of a joined up advanced tutorial frustrating. Over the course of this and the next part in my Capistrano series I will write a detailed tutorial going from installation of Capistrano to being in a position to deploy your website using the 'cap deploy' command. There are other tutorials that achieve this but none that:

Please note that since Capistrano 3's release in October 2013 this Capistrano 2 based tutorial series has been superseded by an updated Capistrano 3 tutorial series.

John Lennon once said that 'Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans' and this week's blog post is good evidence of that.