Capistrano Multistage deploying to wrong directory

Question

Im having some problems with my capistrano setup after updating my gems lately. I have a multistage setup with a production and staging setup.

/config/deploy.rb

# setup multistage
set :stages, %w(testing production)
set :default_stage, "testing"
require 'capistrano/ext/multistage'

/config/deploy/production.rb

# Set deploy path
set :deploy_to, "/var/www/mysite/live"
set :rails_env, "production"

/config/deploy/testing.rb

# Set deploy path
set :deploy_to, "/var/www/mysite/test"
set :rails_env, "test"

Problem is that it seems to ignore my deploy_to setting. It just deploys to the default /u/apps/mysite.

I don't know if it has any relevance, the cause of all of this is a move from apache+passenger to nginx+unicorn. I don't think it has anything to do with that though, as this is just the checkout process.

Answer 1

I stumbled across this while on Stack Overflow. Its an old question but since its flagged as open I'm going to give it a shot.

I think this might be a scope issue with how the Capistrano Instances get loaded.

I notice this syntax doesn't work in the production.rb and test.rb files

 set :deploy_to, "/var/www/mysite/live"

But this one does:

set(:deploy_to)  { "/var/www/#{application}/live" }

Its a subtle difference but I think the one that works is actually passing the information as a Proc block, whereas the first one is passing it as a string. I have a sneaky suspicion that by the time the Capistrano Instance comes into being that string is no longer present.

This would indicate to me that something is off in your load or require order as you should be able to set the deploy variables in these files. If you can't figure it out you may be able to cheat and surround the deploy/production.rb or deploy/test.rb code with

Capistrano::Configuration.instance.load do
  # variables, etc here
end

That would definitely tell you that this file isn't being loaded within the scope of the Capistrano instance.

Also minor point but the files should be in

config/deploy # relative to your Rails app

Not

/config/deploy/ # this is an absolute path off of your root folder

Good Luck. Hopefully you've already solved this issue!