Run a command on remote hosts through capistrano from the command line

Question

Is there way to run a command in capistrano without adding it to a Capfile?

example:

cap --eval "run 'du -sh'" --role web

Answer 1

You can use this to run a command on the servers.

cap ROLES=web invoke COMMAND='du -sh'

If you don't even have a cap recipe, you can specify the servers on the command-line:

cap -s user=myusername HOSTS=server1.com,server2.com invoke COMMAND='du -sh'

To see more command-line options, run cap -H and cap -e invoke.

Answer 2

You can use the (experimental) Capistrano shell.

$ cap shell