Capistrano Remote Cache Easter Party ‘08

Thankfully we all survived Easter this year. To celebrate the resurrection of our savior we resurrected our servers into a new cluster at Engine Yard. The new cluster has plenty of room for us to grow as we need more resources. We didn’t kill our servers on Good Friday but we did have two hours of easter downtime right before midnight as we copied the database.

We discovered some new deployment recipes in the process.

Engine Yard has a gem eycap that allows remote caching and dramatically speeds up deployment for our plugin laden application. It works by checking out our code on the remote system. For every deploy the code is updated and then copied minus the .svn directories. That means an entire svn checkout is not needed!

First install the gem:

gem install eycap –source http://gems.engineyard.com

Then add this to your deploy.rb:

require ‘eycap/recipes’

set :deploy_via, :filtered_remote_cache

set :repository_cache, “/var/cache/somewhere”

The license included says anyone who has the software can use it so I think I’m allowed talk about it. Enjoy.