Use Capistrano for Rake tasks?

Question

Is Capistrano only used for deploying Rails apps?

Basically I want a scripting framework to handle all server/client scripting for me.

Examples:

• Updating Ubuntu, installing gems with dependencies etc.

• Creating a new Rails app, Git initialize it and commit, create Heroku project and upload the app.

• Automatize basic file/folder operations

Should I consider to use Capistrano for this (cause it can handle server/clients) or should I just use Rake for it?

Capistrano could do everything Rake could, but not the other way around?

What are the pros and cons with each?

Answer 1

A few attempts have been made at making capistrano more universal - capistrano-boss and my own capistrano-provisioning, for example - it may be that somebody has already done it. Certainly, in terms of running commands remotely and organising tasks, namespaces, hooks etc, capistrano is second-to-none. But I've yet to see a comprehensive solution that allows you to really administer remote systems using it.

Have you investigated chef? It seems that this is frequently used in conjunction with cap. 37signals, for example, have extensive chef recipes available - and they were also the source of capistrano.