Where can I find reliable documentation for creating Capistrano tasks? - ruby-on-rails

I'm at a loss trying to find reliable documentation for creating Capistrano tasks on an application that I'm trying to upgrade. I've tried to find documentation on
Capistrano Docs
Hungry and Foolish Writing Capistrano tasks
Rails Cast Capistrano Task
and some wikis that are generally unhelpful or provide snippets of capistrano tasks. I know that Capistrano version 3 is based off Rake file syntax but what I want to do is to find a list of keywords/commands so I can rewrite pre-written Capistrano tasks from an earlier version. Links or resources would be much appreciated. Thanks.
*I am working on an application that has been using Capistrano 1.6 and now I need to upgrade to 3. The tasks are written, all I need to do is translate it into Cap 3.

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Implement capistrano in ruby on rails having database MongoDB

I want to implement capistrano in my ruby on rails project. I am using MongoDB as database .
I install capistrano gem.
capify .
[add] writing './Capfile'
[add] writing './config/deploy.rb'
[done] capified!
It gives me file deploy.rb inside the Config. What should i do inside. so where do i have to put mongoid.yml ? Working code is helpful for me to do or some hints is appreciable.
You should first be clear about why you want to implement capistrano :-)
Capistrano is a tool for making deployments easier - it allows for executing commands in multiple remote machines, via ssh.
For a default installation of a Rails App with mongodb, you don't need to have anything related to mongodb in the capistrano deploy.rb file.
You would add some mongodb stuff in this file if there is some mongodb related task that you want to accomplish every time the code is deployed to the remote servers.
Example: Here is a capistrano recipe example to synchronize local mongodb with production
I would recommend that you familiarize yourself with the basics of capistrano by watching the railscast episode on capistrano tasks.
Put mongoid.yml in /config, and type cap deploy in /.

Rake vs. Warbler in Ruby?

I have used Warble to make .war files. That worked pretty well.
Some of the tutorials online suggest using the "rake" command at various times. If rake is for compilation, I thought Ruby didn't need compilation. Is it a substitute for Warble? Or do these two play different functions?
When is rake meant to be used?
Rake is a tool written in Ruby for automating tasks, which you also write using a Ruby syntax. Ruby program's don't have to be built, but there are still plenty of other tasks involved in development that you can automate instead of doing yourself each time.
Some examples from Rails include migrating your database to a new schema or creating a new database.
Rake lets you write tasks with a Ruby syntax, and you can also specify dependencies between tasks, so that running one task will cause all of its dependencies to be ran first.
Think of rake as a make for Ruby. For example for one of the gems I develop, the Rakefile includes several tasks, like running all the tests (rake test) or building the gem (rake gem:build). More info on the web site:
http://rake.rubyforge.org/

Rails OpenID Authentication Plugin No Longer Installs Rake Tasks?

I'm following the Railscasts tutorial on using OpenID with AuthLogic.
This command:
$ script/plugin install git://github.com/rails/open_id_authentication.git
installs the plugin, but I don't see any OpenID Rake tasks (rake -T). In particular, I can no longer run the task:
$ rake open_id_authentication:db:create
With previous applications, the Rake tasks were installed without a problem, so what's changed with the plugin? Which version of the plugin do I need to get the behavior I'm looking for?
Using Rails 2.3.5.
Looks like the task has been taken out (unnecessary?). This bug report (link now broken but less than one hour ago worked) outlines the problem, but doesn't seem to give a definite answer of what's going on.

How is Capistrano related to Rake?

I'm starting to read up on Capistrano after using Rake tasks to deploy apps for a long time. It's really striking how similar it is to Rake. A lot of parallel commands (like cap -T) and a lot of identical concepts (namespaces, tasks).
Does anyone know the history behind that? Is Capistrano an extension of Rake, or built on top of it?
UPDATE: Capistrano v3 switched back to using a Rake DSL instead of rolling their own DSL.
Capistrano v1 and v2 had no dependencies on rake. It was written from scratch as a DSL for handling remote servers. It's evident that some aspects of capistrano were influenced by rake, but Jamis Buck felt it was necessary to make capistrano stand on its own. Capistrano tasks behave slightly differently than rake tasks and their hookable nature separates them from rake tasks.
Capistrano has received minor criticism for not building upon rake, but it is still the most popular deployment tool at least in the rails community. Other projects such as Vlad the Deployer counter capistrano's implementation by using rake and ssh directly.
Capistrano started out as a series of Rake tasks but went indie early on in its development.

De-capistrano a rails app?

I've inherited a rails site that I need to deploy (quickly!) to our webhost, which is a standard *nix shared server that uses FastCGI for rails apps. I've worked with rails sites on multiple occasions in the past but wouldn't consider myself an expert by any stretch.
This particular app was developed using capistrano, with which I've got no experience, and everything I've read leads me to believe that to deploy the app "properly" would require my setting up an external svn account, among other things, which aren't feasible given our time frame and hosting situation.
My question is: what is the best way to quickly get this application up and running without using capistrano? I received, along with the site files, a .sql dump that I've already imported, and I've configured config/database.yml to reflect the correct production db settings. Right now, running ruby script/console production yields the following error message:
/home/user1/ruby/gems/gems/activesupport-2.3.3/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:443:in `load_missing_constant':NameError: uninitialized constant ApplicationController
Thanks for your consideration!
As the others already stated, you are probably using the incorrect version.
Rails switched from app_controller to application_controller (or something like that) in version 2.1 or 2.2.
There is a rake task that you should be able to run in that case:
rake rails:update:application_controller
It might help you.
As for the capistrano. In your deploy.rb you can add the parameter :deploy_via :
set :deploy_via, :copy
set :scm, :none
And it should use the copy you are having in your working directory to deploy with (no need for subversion or any other version control)
Copy usually fetches the code from a repository locally and then uploads it to the server, but also setting the :scm to none it should ignore that and just (hopefully) use your working copy instead.
All capistrano requires is a deploy.rb and a Capfile, this is not what is causing your error. From the looks of it it seems that the problem is that you're using a gem rails version which is incompatible with your app, do you know which version it was developed with? If so you should try vendoring your rails directory to the right version.
For deployment, if you're using FastCGI you can just upload the files to the host and set the appropriate permissions and you should be good to go. Going forward you might want to look at upgrading to a newer version of rails, using capistrano and changing your environment to use apache passenger.
I hope this helps.
The problem you're running into appears to be a mismatch of your installed version and the version that the app is expecting. Look in config/environment.rb, Toward the top you'll see something that looks like:
RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '2.3.4'
You need to make sure that the version of rails installed on your machine matches whatever version is declared in that file. You can do that by running:
sudo gem install -v=X.X.X rails
where X.X.X matches what was in your environment.rb.
Jonnii is suggesting you "freeze" your rails by including all the rails code into your project directly, (which can be done by running rake rails:freeze:gems AFTER you have followed the above steps and gotten the correct gems installed in the first place.) Once you've frozen rails, then you no longer need to have the rails gems installed on your webserver machine.
Good luck!

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