Capistrano and the Rails Application Lifecycle

Appendices

There are a few auxillary utilities such as SSH and Subversion that we cannot do without. You can read through these quick references for some of the most common elements (including those required for Capistrano to work well), but you may also want to research these topics more on your own.

Subversion

As we mentioned back in A Basic Deployment, Subversion isn’t the only source code management system in town, but it’s definitely a good one. If you’re using CVS right now, you can certainly still use Capistrano. However, Subversion’s added features, improved tagging, and renaming capabilities make it worth your effort. We can’t go through all of the details of Subversion here, but we can give you the basic outline. We mostly want to make sure that you have good control over your development environment.

Creating a respository

On the machine that will house your repository (which can be your local box if you’re the sole developer but should be a more accessible machine for multiple developers), you can use the svnadmin utility to create an empty repository:

$ svnadmin create /opt/svn/repos

The path is, of course, up to you. At this point, you’ve done all you need to do on the server to get started. You can store multiple projects in one repository, or you can create one repository for each project. Which option you use is dependent on the size of the projects and a large part personal taste.

Accessing your repository

You’ll need to make sure that everyone who’ll ...