Increase reliability of capistrano deploys

Question

I've used capistrano for a long time, but always for sites that weren't critical. If something went wrong, a few minutes of downtime weren't a big problem.

Now I'm working on a more critical service and need to cover my edge cases. One of which is if my local connection to a server becomes interrupted in the middle of a deployment.

One solution I can think of is to do deployments directly from the server, inside of a screen session. This seems like a reasonable and obvious solution, but I'm surprised I've never read about it elsewhere or even seen it recommended in the capistrano documentation.

Any pointers / tips are welcome. Thanks!

Answer 1

There is only a very small time window during a typical Capistrano deploy where a dropped connection would cause trouble. This window is when the current release is linked to the new version and the server is told to restart. If your connection drops before or after that, you're fine.

If you positively need to be safe from disconnects 100%, you can log onto the server, open a screen session and do a cap deploy from the latest release folder.