Ruby on Rails is all about creating high-quality web applications, fast! It follows, then, that deploying new features should be quick and painless, and yet deployment is too often a checklist of labor-intensive tasks. Many teams try to do these tasks by hand. That’s usually a really bad idea: people just aren’t as good at repetitive tasks as machines. ou run the risk of doing it differently the one time it matters, on one machine but not another, or doing it just plain wrong.

Enter Capistrano (formerly called SwitchTower): a push-button deployment utility that makes it equally easy (and consistent!), to deploy to one machine or a whole cluster.

This session will demonstrate how to put Capistrano to work for you deploying new versions of your Rails application the same way, time after time. And when trouble strikes, you'll be able to roll back versions at the flip of a switch. We'll also look at approaches to customizing Capistrano for generalized deployment automation, with Rails apps and otherwise. Along the way I'll share hard-won Capistrano tips and tricks from using Capistrano on at least two commercial Rails applications.