Capistrano 3 deploy with Rsync & Git

Deploy with Rsync to your server from a local Git repository when using Capistrano. Saves you from having to install Git on your production machine and allows you to customize which files you want to deploy.

NOTE: This library has a Mercurial flavored version at jakesgordon/capistrano-rsync-hg

Install with:

gem install capistrano-rsync-git           # or add to your Gemfile

Require it at the top of your Capfile

require "capistrano/rsync"

Tell capistrano to use our Rsync SCM strategy within deploy.rb

set :scm, :rsync

And add other related options to your liking:

set :user,           "deploy"
set :repo_url,       "ssh://git@github.com/myusername/myrepository"
set :branch,         "default"
set :rsync_exclude,  %w[ .git* ]
set :rsync_include,  %w[      ]
set :rsync_options,  %w[ --archive --recursive --delete --delete-excluded ]
set :local_cache,    ".cache_#{fetch(:stage)}"
set :remote_cache,   "shared/cache"

• :user - the user used in the rsync connection (optional).
• :repo_url - the repository to clone.
• :branch - the branch to checkout.
• :rsync_exclude - array of files/paths to exclude from rsync (optional).
• :rsync_include - array of files/paths to override subset of :rsync_exclude (optional).
• :rsync_options - additional rsync options (optional).
• :local_cache - the local cache folder (where the repo will be checked out) - either absolute or relative to the local project root.
• :remote_cache - the remote cache folder (where the files will be rsynced to) - either absolute or relative to capistrano deploy_to variable.

And after setting regular Capistrano options, deploy as usual:

cap production deploy

1. Clones and updates your repository to local_cache on your local machine.
2. Checks out the branch set in the branch variable.
3. Rsyncs to the remote_cache directory on the server.
4. Copies the content of the remote_cache directory to a new release directory.

After that, Capistrano takes over and runs its usual tasks and symlinking.

If you don't want to deploy everything you've committed to your repository, specify :rsync_exclude

set :rsync_exclude, %w[
  .git*
  /config/database.yml
  /test/***
]

cap rsync:stage      # checkout the repo/branch into the :local_cache
cap rsync:sync       # ... and sync to the server(s)
cap rsync:release    # ... and copy to a release folder (but WITHOUT symlinking the current directory)