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Flow

Capistrano v3 provides a default deploy flow and a rollback flow:

Deploy flow

When you run cap production deploy, it invokes the following tasks in sequence:

deploy:starting    - start a deployment, make sure everything is ready
deploy:started     - started hook (for custom tasks)
deploy:updating    - update server(s) with a new release
deploy:updated     - updated hook
deploy:publishing  - publish the new release
deploy:published   - published hook
deploy:finishing   - finish the deployment, clean up everything
deploy:finished    - finished hook

Notice there are several hook tasks e.g. :started, :updated for you to hook up custom tasks into the flow using after() and before().

Rollback flow

When you run cap production deploy:rollback, it invokes the following tasks in sequence:

deploy:starting
deploy:started
deploy:reverting           - revert server(s) to previous release
deploy:reverted            - reverted hook
deploy:publishing
deploy:published
deploy:finishing_rollback  - finish the rollback, clean up everything
deploy:finished

As you can see, rollback flow shares many tasks with deploy flow. But note that, rollback flow runs its own :finishing_rollback task because its cleanup process is usually different from deploy flow.

Flow examples

Assume you require the following files in Capfile,

# Capfile
require 'capistrano/setup'
require 'capistrano/deploy'
require 'capistrano/bundler'
require 'capistrano/rails/assets'
require 'capistrano/rails/migrations'

When you run cap production deploy, it runs these tasks:

deploy
  deploy:starting
    [before]
      deploy:ensure_stage
      deploy:set_shared_assets
    deploy:check
  deploy:started
  deploy:updating
    git:create_release
    deploy:symlink:shared
  deploy:updated
    [before]
      deploy:bundle
    [after]
      deploy:migrate
      deploy:compile_assets
      deploy:normalize_assets
  deploy:publishing
    deploy:symlink:release
  deploy:published
  deploy:finishing
    deploy:cleanup
  deploy:finished
    deploy:log_revision

For cap production deploy:rollback, it runs these tasks:

deploy
  deploy:starting
    [before]
      deploy:ensure_stage
      deploy:set_shared_assets
    deploy:check
  deploy:started
  deploy:reverting
    deploy:revert_release
  deploy:reverted
    [after]
      deploy:rollback_assets
  deploy:publishing
    deploy:symlink:release
  deploy:published
  deploy:finishing_rollback
    deploy:cleanup_rollback
  deploy:finished
    deploy:log_revision
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