Capistrano for deployments

We have being developing our project list rapidly, which means we were working on lots of projects. With this we were adopting lots of tools to save time with our work. One thing which was worrying and which took a lot of time was the deployments. We were uploading the bundle of source which we export from the SVN for every site, every time we want to deploy. We found this takes quite a lot of time when working on different projects, and doing several deployment for a test environment. This thrived the eagerness to search for a better time saving deployment method.

After some reasearch we found Capistrano is going to be our hero. It comes as a ruby gem, and used heavily for ruby deployments, yet it is usable for PHP deployments too. Now what we found great is the power of Capistrano to work remotely. Basically our need is to export the codes from the SVN and copy it there to the right place of the server. As capistrano appeared on the stage it was quite simple, now we only right a deployment task in the configs, give the directives to capistrano where to take the export from, how to login, etc. and let it to do the deployment.

This saves a lot of time, and risk of breaking a site has been less. We will try to post more about capistrano recipes in future, till now we used it to deploy products to Amazon EC2 servers, and VPS.net servers. We plan to use it as our deployment manager.