Deploying our web app

So we have got a web application in Rails that we need to deploy.  The standard convention is to use Capistrano.  Like most things in Rails (due to using the Windows platform), it doesn’t quite work out of box but with a little tweaking, it is brilliant.  We can now deploy to our servers in seconds at the click of a button.  This is how deployment should be done.

When using Microsoft ASP.Net, we would have to check that all the developers had checked in, then compile for 20 minutes, create a setup file, ftp the file to the server, check that no one was logged in (as this generally stopped the installation), run the installer for 5 minutes and then check that nothing was broken and if it was spend 30 minutes rolling everthing back by hand.

Now one of us just presses an icon on our toolbar which runs a batch file, asking which installation we want to install, put in the server password and 30 seconds later the web app is up.  Worth its weight in gold and allows the testers to have fast version turn arounds.