So, I need to deploy changes to a work-related project from my laptop to a dev server. I was told that one of our other developers had a solution using shell scripts, but I couldn't figure out a problem with it and didn't want to hack away at his scripts in case I broke something he was depending on. So, I figured it was time to go back to Capistrano and simply hack my deploy script I had used for another deployment to fit this circumstance.
So, off I went hacking away at it and testing it. Then I discovered something: I need to be able to send a password for both running some commands on the remote server and for checking some stuff out of a SVN repository. So, I did some googling and here's what I came up with:
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task :deploy do
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run "sudo cp -r #{deploy_to} #{deploy_to}-old" do |ch, stream, out|
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ch.send_data "#{sudo_password}\n" if out =~ /Password:/
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end
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run "sudo svn --quiet --force #{checkout} #{repository} #{deploy_to} do |ch, stream, out|
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ch.send_data "#{svn_password}\n" if out =~ /.xmlteam.com's password:/
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end
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end
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task :rollback do
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run "sudo mv -r #{deploy_to}-old #{deploy_to}" do |ch, stream, out|
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ch.send_data "#{sudo_password}\n" if out =~ /Password:/
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end
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end
All those #{...} values are simply variables I defined in the recipe file. You don't actually expect me to tell you what my passwords are for access to various machines, do you? 
I remember how difficult this stuff was to do in previous versions of Capistrano, requiring all sorts of hacks to make it deploy non-Rails applications but they removed that dependency with Capistrano 2.0, thus making it possible to use Capistrano with ANY project, not just a Rails one. Although you can use a lot of built-in magic if you use Capistrano to deploy a Rails project.
Now that I know how easy it is to pass data to the remote server, I can actually envision some fairly complicated deployment scripts. Hope this helps out other people who've come here and read my other post about using Capistrano to deploy their CakePHP projects.
Tags: capistrano, PHP
I've been learning Phing lately. Ever tried it?
It's another deployment/automation utility (powered by php), but it can be used to work on/with any type of file.
Oh, it's based on Ant.
@derek
I did try Phing...and did not like that there were all sorts of XML configuration files to get it to work. Capistrano uses Ruby (a co-worker has described Ruby as Bash-on-Steriods) and I find the deployment recipes to be a lot more human readable. I'm sure Phing is good for deployment, it's just not for me.