When beginning with Capistrano, it’s often difficult for people to visualise how all the gears fit together.
Capistrano is a system for intermediate-to-advanced programmers to execute commands in a structured, repeatable way on one or more remote machines.
It is incidentally pre-configured for deploying Ruby Rails applications; However people are successfully deploying PHP, Python, Haskell and Erlang systems with it, not to mention static sites. Capistrano is also suitable for server administration. Software such as Paukul’s Xool (designed for Unix user key management) are built around our framework.
Successful use of Capistrano depends on a working knowledge of:
- SSH (With configured SSH Keys)
- Ruby
- Rake (in, that we follow their structure of [[task definitions]])
- Source control software
Next: Getting Started