CREDITS: Originally posted to the newsgroup by Clayton Cottingham 

Minor Edits and Format Changes: Amr Malik

Revised February 22, 2008 by Troy Will <troydwill@gmail.com>

======================================== Start Here =======================================

Scenario:

Create a skeleton Ruby on Rails application named 'simple_app' on machine 'A.' Use Capistrano on A to deploy and start simple_app onto a server named 'B'. We assume the database and the Subversion repository are on B, though each may be on on different machines. The IP address for B is AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD.

We need to install:

1. ruby
2. ruby gems
3. ruby termios (excluding windows)

Next, we install the necessary gems on the client from which we will run Capistrano:

A> gem install rake rails termios capistrano

We make a bare bones rails application

A> rails simple_app

Then we "capify" the project:

A> cd simple_app
A> capify .

Now we edit config/deploy.rb with proper variable settings for our server:

==<app>/config/deploy.rb==
set :application, "simple_app"

set :user, "your_username"            # defaults to the currently logged in user

set :runner, "your_username"

set :repository, "svn://AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD/#{application}/trunk"

set :svn_username, "your_svn_username"
set :svn_password, Proc.new {Capistrano::CLI::password_prompt('SVN Password:')}

role :web, "AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD"
role :app, "AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD"
role :db,  "AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD", :primary => true
set :deploy_to, "/u/apps/simple_app" # defaults to "/u/apps/#{application}"


# =============================================================================
# TASKS
# =============================================================================

desc "Restart mongrel"
task :restart, :roles => :app do
run "cd #{deploy_to}/current; script/server -d"
end

<<file continues>>
==<app>/config/deploy.rb==

Now we will import our capified Rails application into the subversion repository and check it back out:
 svn import -m "import deploy test" . svn://AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD/deploy/trunk
 cd ../
 mv simple_app/ simple_app.start
 svn co svn://AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD/deploy/trunk simple_app

Now we are ready to deploy the app:
 cd simple_app

 rake remote:setup
 cap deploy

Now some things can go wrong at this stage:
if your deploy server is not posix shell youll need to set this
B> chsh -s bash
should do it

if you are having problems with ssh try something simple to test it
A>  ssh deploy ls