deploying with capistrano with remote git repo but without git running on production server

Question

I have a remote git repository setup for centralized development within my team. However, the production server that we deploy our applications currently does not have git running on it. We want to use capistrano to deploy our applications how can we set up our deploy recipes to 'pull' from the remote git repositories when deploying?

In other words can I do something like this?

set :repository, "myserver.com/git/#{application}.git"
set :scm, "git"
set :deploy_via, :copy

Answer 1

The solution in your question is close to correct. You'll need to specify your git repository a little differently, though. What you need is:

set :repository, "someuser@somehost:/home/myproject"
set :scm, "git"
set :deploy_via, :copy

There's more examples of how to set up git deployment in your Capistrano gem under lib/capistrano/recipes/deploy/scm/git.rb.

What happens when you use the copy deploy strategy is that Capistrano clones your git repo to /tmp on your local machine, tars & zips the result, and then transfers it to the server via sftp. The copy strategy also supports copying via scp, but there's no way to tell it to do that without hacking around in the source a bit.