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This is legacy documentation for Capistrano 2.x. For Capistrano 3.x, please refer to http://www.capistranorb.com/.

General Resources & Beginner Guides

If you are new to Capistrano 2.x please read Getting Started; once you are familiar with the basics, you may want to read From the beginning which is a much more detailed tutorial. There is also an FAQ here.

You may also want to read and/or contribute to the Capistrano handbook - an immature document that holds some really useful tips, but needs a lot more work!

• Github Guide to Deploying with Capistrano

Frameworks & Tools

• Using Capistrano 2.x with Rails 2.x

• Using Capistrano 2.x with Bundler

• Using Capistrano 2.x with RVM

Intermediate Resources

• Default Deployment Behaviour
• Managing `database.yml` Securely
• Packaging Recipes
• Writing Extensions

Reference Resources

• API Documentation
• DSL Documentation
  • Action Module (put(), get(), run(), stream(), capture(), etc)
  • Configuration Module (namespace(), task(), set(), fetch(), etc)
• Configuration Variables
• Capistrano Tasks
• Formatting Logs
• Upgrading to Rails 4

Useful Background Knowledge (3rd Party Articles)

• Unix Shell

  • Unix shell skills (Wordpress guide, but very readable for beginners)

• Bash

  • Shell scripting for beginners

• SSH

  • Getting Started with SSH
  • What is an SSH Agent
  • How SSH Agent Forwarding Works
  • What are deploy keys?

Semi-Official Extensions

• Capistrano Multistage, Deploying to Multiple Environments
• Rails-less Deploy

3rd Party Extensions

• capistrano-windows-server Deploy Rails apps to Windows servers
• capistrano-offroad For deploying non-rails apps, specifically Django
• capistrano-nc OS X Notification center add-on to Capistrano
• capistrano_winrm Run commands against MS Windows servers with WinRM
• capify-ec2 A number of utilities to help with deploying to amazon ec2 instances
• resque_utils Helper tasks for remote Resque deployments (requeue & remove failed jobs)
• capistrano-ash For deploying Magento, Drupal, WordPress, and Zend/Doctrine apps
• play-capistrano For deploying/controlling remote Play Framework apps
• capifony For deploying symfony and Symfony2 apps
• capcake extension of Capistrano, deploy CakePHP apps
• capistrano-chef Integrates Capistrano with Chef search
• capistrano-puppet Integrates Capistrano with Puppet
• capistrano-deploytags Track your current and all previous releases with Git tags automatically at deployment time
• cap_git_tools Another approach to automatically git tagging at deployment, guarding against deploying with uncommitted changes, multi-stage deployment with git, and other git tasks.
• capistrano-detect-migrations Automatically discover and warn about pending Rails migrations with Git before you deploy
• capistrano-notifier Notify via mail and StatsD when deploying
• capistrano-remote-cache-with-project-root Adds a new deployment strategy to deploy your app from an internal folder (non-root).
• magentify Deployment recipes customised for deployment of Magento projects.
• uberspacify Uberspacify helps you deploy a Ruby on Rails app on Uberspace, a popular shared hosting provider.
• Capistrano::Rsync Deploy with Rsync from any local (or remote) repository. Works (only) with the new Capistrano v3!
• capistrano-conditional Adds support for conditionally running deployment tasks based on which files have been changed.
• cap-elb Deploy to AWS instance sets behind an Amazon ELB (load balancer).
  • capistrano-db-tasks Useful DB and Assets tasks

3rd Party Tutorials

• Testing
  • Testing Capistrano with Cucumber
• Other Software Packages
  • Drupal
    • http://tempe.st/2008/07/deploying-drupal-with-capistrano/
    • Combining Capistrano and Drush for deploying Drupal websites
  • Magento
    • http://www.designdisclosure.com/2012/04/deploy-magento-with-capistrano/
    • https://github.com/diglin/Capistrano/tree/master/capistrano_presentation_hackathon2013
  • Wordpress
    • http://github.com/jestro/wordpress-capistrano/tree/master
    • http://whomwah.com/2006/05/21/deploying-wordpress-using-capistrano/
    • http://devblog.imedo.de/2008/6/23/wordpress-deployment-with-capistrano-2-and-git
    • http://www.tractionco.com/blog/95-deploying-wordpress-with-capistrano-and-svn
    • http://theme.fm/2011/08/tutorial-deploying-wordpress-with-capistrano-2082/
    • https://github.com/herrkris/wordpress-capistrano
  • Ezpublish
    • https://github.com/alafon/alcapon
• Other Languages / Frameworks
  • PHP
    • http://mathew-davies.co.uk/2009/10/28/php-deployment.html
    • http://hivelogic.com/articles/deploying-expressionengine-github-capistrano
    • http://blog.servergrove.com/2011/09/07/deploying-symfony2-projects-on-shared-hosting-with-capifony
    • Using Capistrano for deploying PHP and other none Rails based websites
    • https://github.com/everzet/capifony
  • Any Non-Rails Project

Seeking Assistance

Help first and foremost via the Capistrano Google Group. Community support is also also often available in #Capistrano on freenode.

There are extensive archives of questions and answers also at stackoverflow.com, tagged #capistrano.

For bugs and problems please open an issue in the Github issues page - preferably with a patch, test-case, or steps-to-reproduce. Pull requests on Github will be ignored without a corresponding ticket, as there is no history of changes or forum for discussion without submitting a ticket.