Peter Marklund

Peter Marklund's Home

Wed Aug 06 2008 00:46:56 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Faster Capistrano Subversion Deployments with remote_cache

This is old news, but if you are deploying an application with Capistrano from Subversion and you find yourself waiting impatiently for the checkout to happen everytime, try adding this to deploy.rb:

set :deploy_via, :remote_cache

With this setting Capistrano will keep a Subversion checkout under shared/cached-copy, and on each deploy just do an svn update followed by a local copy of the whole tree into releases. I found this to be significantly faster than the default checkout on each deploy.

I am planning to switch to Git and GitHub now, and I am curious to see if this setting will affect deployment speed with Git. Given that a git clone in my experience is blazingly fast, maybe the remote cache won't be needed?