Last night I gave a wee presentation to the Scottish Ruby User Group about Capistrano 2, and some of the ways I’ve been working with it over the last couple of weeks, since for some reason I seem to have been immersed in it for a couple of different projects. It’s nothing particularly groundbreaking, but I figured it was useful to demonstrate some of the things it’s capable of, and how much easier it makes my life on a daily basis. You can find a copy of the slides here, complete with my speaker notes:

• Capistrano 2 Rocks My World (Keynote format)
• Capistrano 2 Rocks My World (PDF format)

The speaker notes are probably completely different from what I actually talked about because it turned out that the way I was setup, I couldn’t read my notes! Hey ho, you live and learn!

At this month’s Scottish Ruby User Group meeting, I’ll be talking about some of the neat things I’ve been doing with Capistrano 2 lately and how it totally rocks my world. Chances are (can you tell I haven’t finished writing it yet?!?) we’ll cover:

• What’s new and exciting in Capistrano 2.
• Creating and bundling your own recipes into plugins.
• Some of the stuff I’ve already bundled up, including:
  • Managing Rails apps with the Solaris Service Management Framework refactored to cope with other ‘daemon strategies’ (as I decided to call them).
  • Staging deployment, complete with release management. This one is pretty cool, IMHO, the core of which was stolen from Jamis Buck’s Harnessing Capistrano tutorial, but I’ve tweaked it slightly.
• Using Capistrano for something other than deploying Rails applications. Chances are it’ll have something to do with mail systems.

There will be live demos on live sites (oooh! aaahhh!), assuming I get Internet access. Otherwise there’ll be mocked up demos on a VMWare instance.

Anyway, Skills Matter have kindly provided us with a venue. We’ll be at the Edinburgh Training Centre, 16 St Mary’s Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1SU (Google Map though the entrance is on St Mary’s Street itself!) this Thursday, 19th July, at 19:30 sharp. The doors may be locked, so you’ll have to buzz the intercom to gain access.

Update Well, that’s the presentation put together. Nothing like doing things at the last minute, eh? Chances are I’m not going to get as far as talking about using Rails for things other than deployment; I’ll have to save that for another month and just cover what’s shiny about 2.0 this time around. We’ll see how much I ramble on, though.