Bruno Miranda's Notebook

Personal Blog about Ruby on Rails, XHTML, CSS, and Design

In preparation for my presentation next Monday, July 23, I set out to install and configure Capistrano 2 and ssh locally (OS X) so that I can demonstrate the deployment of a Rails app using Capistrano 2.

I followed the instructions online, setting up a new user called deploy, starting up the ssh server for that user and making sure that all PATH were correct.

A way to test your paths is running

echo $PATH

The above should return the location for the binaries for to ruby, rake, gem, etc are located.

Mine did so, I thought life was great. I created the following recipe:

load 'deploy' if respond_to?(:namespace)

require 'mongrel_cluster/recipes'

set :application, "hello"
set :domain, "localhost"
set :repository, "file:///Users/Bruno/svn/hello/"
set :deploy_to, "/Users/deploy/www/sites/#{application}" 
set :user, "deploy"
set :use_sudo, false
set :scm, :subversion
set :scm_command, "/usr/local/bin/svn"

role :app, domain
role :web, domain
role :db,  domain, :primary => true

namespace :deploy do

  desc "Run after every successful deployment." 
  task :after_default do
    cleanup
  end

  desc "Restart Mongrel"
  task :restart, :roles => :app do
     run "cd /Users/deploy/www/sites/hello/current/ && script/server"
   end

end

Which should be enough to properly deploy and start the mongrel server. That was not the case. I kept getting errors related to cap not being able to find the path to rake or rubygems.

With the help of my fried Chris Saylor, I created a task to inspect the system variables:

  desc "Debug task."
  task(:debug_env) { run "env" }

Upon running the task above I noticed that the path= line was not showing the proper path to where my binaries where located. It should have been:/usr/local/bin

It turns out that I had to set create an ssh environment path in ~/.ssh/environment

PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin

Also, you will need to edit /etc/sshd_config, uncommenting the line that states: PermitUserEnvironment no, and changing the value to yes.

#
PermitUserEnvironment yes
#

After those changes have been made, you should be able to run:

cap deploy:setup
cap deploy

Enjoy!

PS. Thanks to everyone that had the patience to put up with me while I pulled my hair out for 2 days trying to find the answer to this problem, that includes, voxdolo, cwsaylor and queso.

Michel Barbosa published his thesis on key adoption factors and demographic characteristics of companies already using Ruby on Rails.

He conducted extensive research and survey on a large number of companies that have already adopted Ruby on rails as their development framework.