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Ruby Deployment Roundup: Vlad 1.3, Capistrano Maintenance Handover

Posted by Robert Bazinet on Mar 06, 2009

Sections: Operations & Infrastructure,; Development
Topics: Ruby on Rails ,; Ruby ,; Dynamic Languages ,; Deployment / Datacenter ,; Languages ,; Deployment ,; Infrastructure ,; RubyGems ,; Programming ,; Cloud Computing

The recent announcement Jamis Buck is ending development of Capistrano has left many wondering the future of this deployment tool. The release of Vlad 1.3 gives others hope as an alternative.

Vlad 1.3 Released

On March 4th, Vlad the Deployer 1.3 was released and announced on the Polishing Ruby weblog. Vlad is touted as being like Capistrano but 1/10th the complexity and integrates with Rake.

The recent release adds 9 new features including:

Git Support
Merb Support
Passenger and Lighttpd Support
Added darcs support
Added/merged god, nginx, thin, and maintenance tasks
Allow set to specify that a proc value is :per_thread
Apply Mercurial SCM support patch
remote_task now supports args and supplies task

Along with these new features there are also 19 minor updates and 11 bug fixes. Please see the release announcement for a complete list of fixes and update.

Vlad can be installed with the usual:

gem install vlad

Find out more information about Vlad the Deployer on the project web site.

Capistrano Maintenance Handover

After the recent release of Capistrano 2.5.5, Jamis Buck announced he was stepping away from the Capistrano project and would not be doing any more development or support.

I’m ceasing development on SQLite/Ruby, SQLite3/Ruby, Net::SSH (and related libs, Net::SFTP, Net::SCP, etc.) and Capistrano. I will no longer be accepting patches, bug reports, support requests, feature requests, or general emails related to any of these projects. For Capistrano, I will continue to follow the mailing list, and might appear in the #capistrano irc channel from time to time, but I am no longer the maintainer of these projects.

This left many users of Capistrano wondering about the future of many developer's favorite Ruby deployment tool. Well, Lee Hambley, a developer for the company SetFire:

We’re proud to announce that as of today one of our developers, Lee Hambley has taken over maintenance of capify.org. For many people involved in Ruby on Rails development, Capistrano is a vital tool, making the whole process of maintaining production environments that much simpler, by automating and combining many of the more laborious and repetitive tasks involved.

He will be hosting and maintaining the Capify.org site, as well as consolidating and hopefully coordinating new developments to the gem when a new code maintainer is selected.

There has been some interested parties who have identified themselves on the Capistrano Google Group. Jonathan Weiss and Mathias Meyer of the Webistrano and Macistrano projects respectively have spoken up expressed a desire to maintain the Capistrano code base:

Mathias Meyer and I are quite familiar with the Capistrano code base (we wrote Webistrano, Macistrano, and a couple of smaller extensions). We can see ourselves taking over maintainership for Capistrano and Net::S*.

Things are certainly looking positive for the future development and support of Capistrano.