Redirect Output of Capistrano

Question

I have a Capistrano deploy file (Capfile) that is rather large, contains a few namespaces and generally has a lot of information already in it. My ultimate goal is, using the Tinder gem, paste the output of the entire deployment into Campfire. I have Tinder setup properly already.

I looked into using the Capistrano capture method, but that only works for the first host. Additionally that would be a lot of work to go through and add something like:

output << capture 'foocommand'

Specifically, I am looking to capture the output of any deployment from that file into a variable (in addition to putting it to STDOUT so I can see it), then pass that output in the variable into a function called notify_campfire. Since the notify_campfire function is getting called at the end of a task (every task regardless of the namespace), it should have the task name available to it and the output (which is stored in that output variable). Any thoughts on how to accomplish this would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

It's sort of a hackish means of solving your problem, but you could try running the deploy task in a Rake task and capturing the output using %x.

# ...in your Rakefile...
task :deploy_and_notify do
  output = %x[ cap deploy ]  # Run your deploy task here.
  notify_campfire(output)
  puts output                # Echo the output.
end

Answer 2

Hi,

I recommend not messing with the Capistrano logger, Instead use what unix gives you and use pipes:

$ cap deploy | my_logger.rb

Where your logger reads STDIN and STDOUT and both records, and pipes it back to the appropriate stream.

For an alternative, the Engineyard cap recipies [ http://github.com/engineyard/eycap ] have a logger [ http://github.com/engineyard/eycap/blob/master/lib/eycap/lib/ey_logger.rb ] – this might be a useful reference if you do need to edit the code, but I recommend not doing.