Deploy tracking with Ruby on Rails and Capistrano

Question

Like every commit has a reason and purpose, I think each deploy has a purpose and reason. Source code commits have a comment. But deploying doesn't have any.

How do I record a reason and purpose for each deploy automatically?

I need to keep a record of:

• Who deployed to where and what time.
• Why deployed? Bug fixes? Feature update? Emergency fix not on iteration plan?
• Which git or svn ref was used?

Have anybody felt the need for this kind of system? How do you feel about my approach? How can I achieve my goal? I'm currently using Capistrano for deployment.

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A bounty added. I'd like to hear more stories from different developers who are doing "continuous deployment".

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I found two services that do deploy tracking:

• Codebase
• Hoptoad

Answer 1

Webistrano - http://wiki.github.com/peritor/webistrano - is a web interface to capistrano, that also tracks who's deployed what and when, so that could be worth investigating.

Answer 2

My current project uses a modified version of the apinsein's git-deployment recipe, which (when you tell cap to do a deploy) will tag current HEAD with a Git tag (which gives you all the benefits of normal Git commits).