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400 CHAPTER 14 Deployment
With the Capistrano configuration done, you can run the cap command, passing
in the name of a task to set up your application, such as deploy:setup. This task is
one of a group of tasks that are provided by default with Capistrano. To see a list of
these tasks, use the cap -T command.
14.5.3 Setting up the deploy environment
You’ll now use the deploy:setup task, which will set up the folder where your application
is deployed, /home/ticketeeapp.com/apps/ticketee, with some basic folders:
cap deploy:setup
This command is in the same vein as the rails new command you’ve used previously
because it sets up an identical, standard scaffold for every Capistrano. When this command
runs, you’ll see a large chunk of output that we’ll now break down, one line at a
time:
* executing `deploy:setup'
Capistrano tells you the name of the currently executing task, deploy:setup. The
next line tells you what command it is about to execute.
* executing "mkdir -p /home/ticketeeapp.com/apps/ticketee
/home/ticketeeapp.com/apps/ticketee/releases
/home/ticketeeapp.com/apps/ticketee/shared
/home/ticketeeapp.com/apps/ticketee/shared/system
/home/ticketeeapp.com/apps/ticketee/shared/log
/home/ticketeeapp.com/apps/ticketee/shared/pids
These are the basic directories required for Capistrano. The first directory acts as a
base for your application, containing several different subdirectories, the first of
which is releases. Whenever you deploy using Capistrano, a new release is created in
the releases directory, timestamped to the current time using the same time format as
migrations within Rails (such as 20110205225746, or the full year followed by two digits
each for the month, day, minute, hour, and second, or YYYYMMDDHHmmSS). The latest
release would be the final one in this directory.
The shared directory is the directory where files can be shared across releases,
such as uploads from Paperclip, that would usually go in the public/system directory,
which would now be placed in shared/system.
The shared/log directory is symbolically linked 23 to the current release’s log directory
when you run a deploy. This is so all logs are kept in the shared/log directory
(rather than in each release) so that, if you choose to, you can go back over them and
read them.
The shared/pids directory is symbolically linked to the current release’s tmp/pids
up on deploy. This folder is used for process ids of any other parts of your application.
At the moment, you don’t have any of these and so this directory is of no major
concern.
23 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link.