I was right about Capistrano being a little difficult for me to get up and running. I finally got it going, but I still have a few thing to configure before it’s working perfectly. My main problem was getting the server to run the repository export command successfully. It kept asking for my username/password, which would be fine except that it would still fail anyways. I found about 4 different things from blogs, and the Dreamhost wiki, that were supposed to fix it, but nothing worked. I was trying to set it up using web-dav and it finally occurred to me that I should just use svn+ssh instead. I changed my config file and it worked right away!

So now it’s deploying just fine but I still have to work out the frozen Rails version issue. I don’t want to keep a copy of rails in my repository, so I need to make the ‘vender/rails/’ directory symlink to a shared directory. I also need to set up the other folders that need to be symlinked. There are so many different examples and opinions about what the best way to deploy an app is that I think I’m going to have to spend a little more time figuring out what will be best for my situation. I’m also trying to set up a test and production deployment setting, so that may take a while to figure out too. So once I make a few more tweaks to my deployment file I should have the development server ready to go.

It took me probably around 4 hours to get it all up and running (plus some other things). That’s a little long for what is supposed to be a not-too-hard task, but I learned a lot and I can’t even imagine the potential for how many hours this will save me in the future compared to my old bad habits for web deployment.

Side note: The European Soccer Championship starts today! That means one more thing to distract me over the next couple weeks. ;)

Side note from the wife: I think what he meant to say is that our three year anniversary (today), would be distracting, not the soccer games…