Passing parameters to Capistrano

Question

I\'m looking into the possibility of using Capistrano as a generic deploy solution. By \"generic\", I mean not-rails. I\'m not happy with the quality of the documentation I\'m f

Answer 1

Update: For Capistrano 3, see scieslak's answer below.

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Has jarrad has said, capistrano-ash is a good basic set of helper modules to deploy other project types, though it's not required as at the end of the day. It's just a scripting language and most tasks are done with the system commands and end up becoming almost shell script like.

To pass in parameters, you can set the -s flag when running cap to give you a key value pair. First create a task like this.

desc "Parameter Testing"
task :parameter do
  puts "Parameter test #{branch} #{tag}"
end

Then start your task like so.

cap test:parameter -s branch=master -s tag=1.0.0

For the last part. I would recommend setting up passwordless access using ssh keys to your server. But if you want to take it from the current logged in user. You can do something like this.

desc "Parameter Testing"
task :parameter do
  system("whoami", user)
  puts "Parameter test #{user} #{branch} #{tag}"
end

UPDATE: Edited to work with the latest versions of Capistrano. The configuration array is no longer available.

Global Parameters: See comments Use set :branch, fetch(:branch, 'a-default-value') to use parameters globally. (And pass them with -S instead.)