Capistrano is lacking, but has fewer good alternatives. What would you recommend...

nfm · on Sept 27, 2011

Have you had a look at whiskey_disk: https://github.com/flogic/whiskey_disk ?

It assumes you're using git, supports multiple stages out of the box, uses a reset strategy by default instead of having to hack it in etc.

I'm planning on playing with it today.

tptacek · on Sept 28, 2011

I really couldn't get over how many moving parts Capistrano seemed to have and have switched to Fabric, which I love.

bphogan · on Sept 28, 2011

I dunno, I've stuck with Capistrano... I've used Vlad, but Cap just works and it only needs to be as complicated as you make it. My cap files are usually about 40 lines total and that often includes a section where I write the database.yml on the fly to the server. I've used all the other options, and they're nice, but Cap works nicely still.

technomancy · on Sept 27, 2011

Back when I was doing Ruby I was always fond of Vlad the Deployer: http://rubyhitsquad.com/Vlad_the_Deployer.html No idea if it's aged well.

angelbob · on Sept 28, 2011

Vlad's not bad. There's a similar project called Fezzik that I use extensively for non-Rails projects. Neither is as good as Capistrano if you're deploying a Rails project.

sunkencity · on Sept 27, 2011

I prefer running stuff on heroku, but that's hardly a solution to the problem.

jashkenas · on Sept 28, 2011

Vanilla Ruby to script SSH.

Vitaly · on Oct 3, 2011

we are using vlad instead of capistrano and are very happy with it. it is much simpler conceptually. Also from several projects that I converted from capistrano to vlad it runs much much faster for the standard deployment process. I'm not sure what is the reason as I didn't investigate it much.

we have custom vlad plugins for usual rails related stuff, so our config/deploy.rb scripts are usually about 5-10 lines long. see https://github.com/astrails/vladify