Capistrano myths
Monday, April 14th, 2008In addition to EC2, I’m also working with Capistrano. I’ll start by stating that Capistrano is a good deployment system. It really does do the heavy lifting when it comes to deploying new code for both staging and production.
But here’s where the problem lies. Go to the official web page and you’ll see a beautiful picture of a straw-hatted person stranded on an island deep in the ocean with no other forms of life near. This figure is nodding off while his fishing pole dangles in the ocean. We assume his pole is going to catch fish despite the fact that he is sleeping. And here is the metaphor: I can deploy software in my sleep! Finally!
FAIL!
Cap is just as complicated as your network. If it’s programmed poorly it will require you to login to each server and do manual changes. Cap will also not roll back changes unless it’s specially crafted to do so. In the end, I believe that cap is promising, but I’m still logging into servers and manually running commands because I can’t trust cap to do what it says it will 100%.