Ruby on Rails - Testing changes to Capistrano's deploy.rb

Question

I'm trying to test some changes out on production without having to commit and push the changes because I only want to commit what actually works. The project I'm working on was created with Rails (3.0.2), and deploys with Capistrano (3.1). I've tried making changes in the root folder of my app and redeploying, and the changes are not reflected on the website. I've tried making changes in the root/current directory and redeploying and that didn't work.

Is there any way I can redeploy changes to the server without having to push it to Github first?

Answer 1

Is there any way I can redeploy changes to the server without having to push it to Github first?

No this isn't possible since one of the first things that Capistrano will do is git clone the latest from whatever branch you've specified in your deploy config.

I'm not sure what your familiarity with Rails is but the proper way to do this would be to create a new staging environment and deploy to that. The staging environment would have similar settings to your production environment with a separate database so that you don't affect production data.

Capistrano 3 supports this flow out of the box so that once you've set everything up you can simply call

cap staging deploy

to deploy to the staging environment, and

cap production deploy

to deploy to the production environment.