deploy specific revision and branch from git with capistrano

Question

I am trying to deploy a specific revision to a server using Capistrano (we are trying to add a new server to the cluster and of course want it to have the same revision as the other machines). The issue seems to be that we are working on a branch. So, if we do:

cap production deploy:cold -S revision=bb88d26c4ec9e6c4fa132c63f79c8fdf8aa5aec4

it does:

* executing "git clone -q --depth 1 ssh://git@xxx.unfuddle.com/xxx/mc.git /u/apps/xxx/releases/20110407083545 && cd /u/apps/xxx/releases/20110407083545 && git checkout -q -b deploy bb88d26c4ec9e6c4fa132c63f79c8fdf8aa5aec4 && (echo bb88d26c4ec9e6c4fa132c63f79c8fdf8aa5aec4 > /u/apps/xxx/releases/20110407083545/REVISION)"

but we get:

** [new.server.com :: err] fatal: reference is not a tree: bb88d26c4ec9e6c4fa132c63f79c8fdf8aa5aec4

It seems to be ignoring the branch setting in the deploy.rb:

set :branch, "new_ui"

Could this be because of the multistage? Or something else interfering?

Answer 1

You usually get this error because you haven't pushed your repo up to your remote repo. You may only have a local branch called new_ui, but you're not tracking it remotely - so when you push, the branch is not reflected on your remote repo.