Capistrano deployments and MediaWiki
A friend alerted me to an article he put together recently regarding deployments in a custom build environment. It’s intriguing, as my own software company has a similarly-setup system. The idea is to keep logs of deployments on a MediaWiki-powered internal wiki automatically, allowing developers to see what repository revision was rolled out, the build version number, along with other salient information.
For our internal processes, we wanted to keep a running list of the code release version (such as “0.9.1″), the SVN repository revision that was deployed, the timestamp Capistrano used as the folder name in the Releases directory, and a more human-readable date and time of deployment. The first field, the release version, is an arbitrary string given by the person making the deployment; Capistrano prompts the deployer for this string as the first step in the deployment. The repository revision and release timestamp are both provided by Capistrano, and the human-readable date is provided by Media Wiki.
Some additional coolness: automatically linking to BugZilla bug numbers whenever they’re referenced in the commit messages, and automatically creating “readme” files containing commit messages for each new build. Check out the article here.
