Tutorial: Installing Capistrano on Linux Mint

Capistrano is a powerful tool for automating deployments of web applications. It is widely used by developers to deploy their applications on Linux operating systems. In this tutorial, we will learn about how to install Capistrano on Linux Mint latest version.

Step 1: Installing Ruby

Capistrano is a Ruby gem, so the first step is to install Ruby on your Linux Mint system. Ruby can be installed using the following command:

sudo apt install ruby-full

Once installed, you can check the Ruby version using the following command:

ruby -v

Step 2: Installing Bundler and Capistrano

The next step is to install Bundler and Capistrano gems. Bundler is a package manager for Ruby, which helps to manage the gems that will be used in the project.

To install Bundler, use the following command:

sudo gem install bundler

Once installed, navigate to your project's directory and create a Gemfile, which specifies the required gems for the project. Here is a sample Gemfile for installing Capistrano:

source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'capistrano', '~> 3.16'
gem 'capistrano-rails'
gem 'capistrano-bundler'
gem 'capistrano-rbenv', '~> 2.1'

Save the Gemfile, and then run the following command to install the gems specified in it:

bundle install

Step 3: Configuring Capistrano

Once the Capistrano gem is installed, the next step is to configure it for your project. Capistrano uses three files for configuration: config/deploy.rb, config/deploy/production.rb and config/deploy/staging.rb.

Here is an example config/deploy.rb file:

set :application, 'your_application_name'
set :repo_url, 'git@github.com:username/your_application_name.git'
set :deploy_to, '/var/www/your_application_name'
set :pty, true
set :linked_files, fetch(:linked_files, []).push('config/database.yml', 'config/secrets.yml')
set :linked_dirs, fetch(:linked_dirs, []).push('log', 'tmp/pids', 'tmp/cache', 'tmp/sockets', 'vendor/bundle', 'public/system')
set :keep_releases, 5

namespace :deploy do
  desc "Restart application"
  task :restart do
    on roles(:app), in: :sequence, wait: 5 do
      execute :touch, release_path.join('tmp/restart.txt')
    end
  end

  after :publishing, :restart
  after :restart, :clear_cache do
    on roles(:web), in: :groups, limit: 3, wait: 10 do
      # Here, we can do anything such as:
      # within release_path do
      #   execute :rake, 'cache:clear'
      # end
    end
  end
end

In this file, you need to replace your_application_name and username with your project's name and your GitHub username respectively. Also, you need to replace the linked files and directories according to your project's requirement.

Next, create two files: config/deploy/production.rb and config/deploy/staging.rb for the production and staging environments respectively. Here is an example config/deploy/production.rb file:

server 'your_server_ip_address', user: 'your_ssh_username', roles: %w{app db web}

In this file, you need to replace your_server_ip_address and your_ssh_username with your server's IP address and your SSH username respectively.

Step 4: Deploying with Capistrano

Now that we have installed and configured Capistrano, we can deploy our project using it. To deploy the project to the production environment, use the following command:

bundle exec cap production deploy

This command will run the deployment script on the server and deploy the project to the specified directory (/var/www/your_application_name in this case).

Congratulations! You have now successfully installed and configured Capistrano on your Linux Mint system and have deployed your project using it.

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