Capistrano is a sexy bitch. At least it was until I spent hours trying to figure out how to deploy to multiple servers. Updated Cap, Ruby, compiled Ruby from source twice, etc etc. Capistrano just kept hanging with pushing code to two or more servers at once. Note that I am in Cygwin, if that makes a difference. Also, when deploying with no password on my ssh key, it works…hmm.

Well I added this:

default_run_options[:max_hosts] = 1

To my deploy.rb, and although it now has to deploy to one server at a time, it works. Note that for two servers this is fine. For 200 it’s not so fine. I’ll worry about that when it comes though.

UPDATE!!!! Something I never thought about until now is that you can use ssh-agent to save your keys in memory pre-deploy. Then you have a password-protected key that works with Capistrano WITHOUT doing the max_hosts hack. This is tested (on cygwin) and working for me.