So, I need to deploy changes to a work-related project from my laptop to a dev server. I was told that one of our other developers had a solution using shell scripts, but I couldn't figure out a problem with it and didn't want to hack away at his scripts in case I broke something he was depending on. So, I figured it was time to go back to Capistrano and simply hack my deploy script I had used for another deployment to fit this circumstance.

So, off I went hacking away at it and testing it. Then I discovered something: I need to be able to send a password for both running some commands on the remote server and for checking some stuff out of a SVN repository. So, I did some googling and here's what I came up with:
~~~ task :deploy do run "sudo cp -r #{deploy_to} #{deploy_to}-old" do |ch, stream, out| ch.send_data "#{sudo_password}\n" if out =~ /Password:/ end run "sudo svn --quiet --force #{checkout} #{repository} #{deploy_to} do |ch, stream, out| ch.send_data "#{svn_password}\n" if out =~ /.xmlteam.com's password:/ end end task :rollback do run "sudo mv -r #{deploy_to}-old #{deploy_to}" do |ch, stream, out| ch.send_data "#{sudo_password}\n" if out =~ /Password:/ end end ~~~

All those #{...} values are simply variables I defined in the recipe file. You don't actually expect me to tell you what my passwords are for access to various machines, do you? :) I remember how difficult this stuff was to do in previous versions of Capistrano, requiring all sorts of hacks to make it deploy non-Rails applications but they removed that dependency with Capistrano 2.0, thus making it possible to use Capistrano with ANY project, not just a Rails one. Although you can use a lot of built-in magic if you use Capistrano to deploy a Rails project.

Now that I know how easy it is to pass data to the remote server, I can actually envision some fairly complicated deployment scripts. Hope this helps out other people who've come here and read my other post about using Capistrano to deploy their CakePHP projects.