soaked and soaped

A few days ago Jamis released Capistrano 2.0.

I just wanted to write down some things I ran into — maybe someone finds it useful. This article will not be a complete “what is new in cap 2” article.

renamed variables

• :svn_username is now :scm_username
• :svn_password is now :scm_password

They now are the same for each version control system.

set variables at runtime

A feature I find really helpful. E.g if you don’t want to store a password in the configuration file.

set :scm_password do
    Capistrano::CLI.password_prompt
end

hooks

To hook into an existing task you now have to specify a the whole taskname including the namespace. E.g.:
after "deploy:update_code", :link_in_configfiles where deploy is the namespace and update_code the task name.

To see a full list of tasks and its namespaces run cap -T.

overwriting tasks

The new namespaces also effects how to overwrite a task. E.g. to overwrite the old :restart task, you now have to write it like that (the restart task also is in the deploy namespace):

deploy.task :restart do
    # restart your servers here
end

I think most other things are documented or mentioned here:

• capify.org upgrade page
• Capistrano Google group

Also, because Capistrano won’t win a price for the best documentation, often a look at the source code can be helpful. It’s clean and easy to understand.