One of my favorite features of Rails is the great Capistrano deployment process.  I’ve been using Capistrano to deploy to Linux servers for several months now and absolutely love it.  Recently I ran into a problem deploying to a Unix server and couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was going on.  It turned out that the Unix account I was using for Capistrano deployment defaulted to the Bourne shell.  After much troubleshooting I realized certain commands were not executing correctly and that the Bourne-again shell was the desired solution.  After editing /etc/passwd to set my user account to bash I was good to go:

dennis:x:501:1::/home/dennis:/usr/bin/bash 

I was able to run cap setup and cap deploy with no complaints.  If you ever run into problems where you can deploy successfully to Linux, but not Unix, be sure to check your default shell.

I’m adding this post ignoring the fact that there’s been almost a two month gap since my last post. Let’s say that quite a bit has been going on. With that being said there’s always some mundane task that I need to accomplish, but can’t recall how to do. Today this task was getting my Rails project into my Subversion repository from the command line. I recently switched from Radrails to Textmate on my Mac and am working from the command line until I can get Textmate SVN working. Here’s the almighty command to get your Rails app into a remote repository. This assumes you’re working from the root of your Rails app:

svn import . http://svn.domain.com/svn/myapp -m “Import” –username dennis

I’m going to keep this handy as I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to do this. Thanks again Google.