I can't get enough of the bzr revision control system, and I'm quite fond of Rails too. So, I thought I'd share my deployment setup for Rails applications using Capistrano and bzr.

Capistrano works on the assumption that you're deploying from a revision control system. Secondly, it requires that your deployment server is aware of how to access this system. This leaves you with various options, the most obvious of which are:

1. Host your source repository on your deployment server
2. Have your deployment server equipped with remote access to your source repository
3. Mirror your repository to your deployment server

Of these, option 1 is out for all but somewhat casual projects, option 2 either opens up your source repository more than I like, or needs fiddly tunnelling of SSH which I don't think Capistrano is up to yet (I only like to use key-based access with SSH, rather than password based access, which seems at the moment complicate life where Capistrano is concerned.)

I've opted for option 3. The pattern I use is this. On setting up the deployment server, I push a copy of the bzr repository to a private directory. Then, on deployment I first update that repository securely from the master repository inside my network, then export the new release locally on the server.

Here are the relevant bits of my Capistrano configuration:

set :repository, "/opt/repo_mirror/#{application}"

…

set :scm, :bzr
set :checkout, "branch"

…

task :before_update_code do
  `bzr push sftp://deploy.example.org/opt/repo_mirror/#{application}`
end

One big advantage of this over option 2, a remote source repository, is that only the changes are sent up to the server, and the bandwidth-intensive application checkout happens locally on the deployment machine.

The final bit of improvement this could stand is to have the bzr checkout use export and not branch, but I think I'll have to alter the Capistrano's bzr plugin in order to do this.