Capistrano: Application Deployment and More

Capistrano (formerly Switchtower) is a tool originally written to help automate application deployment for Ruby on Rails. It does this well, but it has grown up into a tool capable of much, much more. It can be used for deploying Java applications, updating server configurations acrtoss an enterprise, administering netwoeks, backing up files, and all sorts of other activities. Any activity you might do from the command line, you can now do simultaneously across large numbers of machines, with all machines succeeding (or rolling back in case of failure) together.

In this talk I discuss the fundamentals of capistrano, use the built-in tasks to deploy a rails application, demonstrate the capability of performing custom tasks across several computers simultaneously (thanks to several virtual machines), and show how applications can be rolled back in case of problems. Capistrano isn't perfect though; we will also discuss best practices, limitations, and lessons learned.

Capistrano requires a POSIX-compatible shell and SSH on the machines it is going to control; as a side-benefit, we will also learn about CYGWIN, an open source tool that provides these capabilities (and lots lots more) to Windows environments.

About David Bock

David Bock is a Principal Consultant at CodeSherpas, a company he founded in 2007. Mr. Bock is also the President of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group, the Editor of O'Reilly's OnJava.com website, and a frequent speaker on technology in venues such as the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposiums.

In January 2006, Mr. Bock was honored by being awarded the title of Java Champion by a panel of esteemed leaders in the Java Community in a program sponsored by Sun. There are approximately 100 active Java Champions worldwide.

David has also served on several JCP panels, including the Specification of the Java 6 Platform and the upcoming Java Module System.

In addition to his public speaking and training activities, Mr. Bock actively consults as a software engineer, project manager, and team mentor for commercial and government clients.

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