Capistrano: How can I leave a git repository on live/deployed

Question

Ok, Using capistrano 3.2 with Rails 4.2.

Put simply I want to have each release on the live server to have an intact git repo with it. I know Cap uses git to clone the files but afik it deletes the .git folder by default. I swear I had this working before on earlier versions of Capistrano but no amount of Docs or Googling is finding the right setting. Or if I had an odd version of Cap

And before I get jumped on with "Version control on live? Never make changes to live, develop on your dev server you idiot!?"

Having an active git repo on live is invaluable if something changes out of your control, or if there is an emergency you have no choice but to monkey patch. Because now you have the change shown up by git and you can commit it, and push it back into your central repo and have it go up stream neatly. Its saved my ass before and means I don't have to copy by hand what I know has fixed the "live" issue. Anyway, justification over. Anyone know how?

I apologies for the simple question, I think it's unlucky google fu which has left me without an answer from searching for this. Searching "Capistrano leave git on live" or other such terms are swamped with using git to deploy.

Cheer in advance.

Answer 1

This would be non-trivial. Capistrano uses git archive piped through tar to create the release folder. Hypothetically, you could override the task which does this, but you would probably spend more effort than it would be worth. I would highly recommend that you look at just creating a workflow where you commit a hotfix and push again. We use a prod branch at which the production deploy points, thus you could commit the change to the prod branch and cap production deploy, then merge your change back down to your development branch.

If you do choose to try and override this, look at the Capistrano source for the git tasks . It uses the Git Strategy class, so you would need to subclass and override it, then override the task to use your class. Capistrano is basically just a subclass of Rake , so look for documentation around overriding a Rake task, eg Overriding rails' default rake tasks .

Good luck!