Deploying on Heroku with Capistrano?

Question

I'm still getting used to the Rails development ecosystem. Recently I learned how to use capistrano for deploying to my servers using apache and passenger, and I love how I can put a rather complex set of deployment instructions into my deploy.rb so that they are executed with a single "cap deploy" call, with an automatic rollback if anything goes wrong.

Now I'm looking into deploying my project on Heroku, and I expected to be able to use capistrano for my deployments there. But I've been unable to find any documentation on how to do this. Is it possible? Are there capistrano tasks that let me automate deployments on Heroku?

Does this even make sense? After all capistrano works in a specific way (ssh into the server) and assumes a specific directory structure (public/releases/shared etc). Both of these are not possible with Heroku as far as I know. But still I would like to have the convenience of capistrano. I know I can put the steps necessary for my deployment (git push/migrate/restart resque workers...) into a single rake task, and I would have the convenience of deploying with a call to a single command; but I would not have the benefit of capistrano transactions and rollbacks, which are very important in my mind.

I'm probably missing something very basic about how these technologies fit together. It surprises me a bit I haven't been able to find any discussion on this subject anywhere. Can anyone share their experiences?

Answer 1

Heroku uses Git for deployment, and is not capistrano friendly. In fact, the philosophy itself is different - Heroku does not have 'servers' where you can SSH to, or customize server to your need.

Heroku uses Dynos, which are predefined instances, with specific deployment architecture which covers majority of Rails deployment needs. You can do actions like Rollbacks, backups, migrations etc with Heroku, in some cases, more sophisticated than normal capistrano scripts.

Unless your setup is quite different, you can safely use Heroku for Rails (with only Git, of course) . If not, AWS is better bet.