The upcoming Capistrano 2.0 adds some very handy features to this already great tool.

Here’s how to deploy your shiny new Rails app to a web server without access to your subversion repository:

# config/deploy.rb

deploy by copying a tarball to the remote host

set :deploy_via, :copy

use export instead of checkout when building the archive

(this happens on your local machine now):

set :copy_strategy, :export

uncomment to use zip instead of tar:

set :copy_compression, :zip

</code>

In my experience the ‘argh, no svn’ scenario occurs more often than not when dealing with client’s web servers. Often firewalls prevent connections from the server to outside servers, and/or there is no subversion installed on the machine. For me this new feature alone justifies the upgrade.