For those of you interested in trying out Mint, the slick PHP-based analytics package, here are a few pointers to using Capistrano to deploy it.
On a related minty note, you might also be interested in the Mint Ruby on Rails Plugin and Configuring Mint for nginx and Ruby on Rails.
I see from the Capistrano group that there’s a new Capistrano recipes plugin on RubyForge. It is called Palmtree and looks like it will include recipes to help control ferret, memcached and backgroundrb amongst others. It requires Capistrano 2.0 (currently only available in preview release form)
Although I have already mentioned some of the deployment-related RailsConf presentations, I just noticed that Jamis Buck’s Capistrano presentation is also available on Slideshare. Here’s an embedded copy to save you leaving RailsDeployment just yet 
Further to my earlier round-up of Dreamhost deployment tips, I see that Jason Harrelson has added his own guide to the mix. Entitled Using Capistrano to overcome deployment hurdles on Dreamhost, it looks like a good overview of the process with plenty of detail on the Dreamost peculiarities as they relate to Rails deployment.
Peter Cooper over at RubyInside is pointing to 3 presentations from this year’s US RailsConf. Two of them seem particularly relavent to those interested in Rails deployment - Scaling a Rails Application from the Bottom Up (by Jason Hoffman at Joyent) and a Capistrano Tutorial (by Jamis Buck).
Incidentally, Jamis Buck also has an overview of the new 2.0 Preview release of Capistrano that is worth a read to see what’s coming next.
Following on from my discovery of the Ruby on Rails Stacks Google group yesterday, I see that Bradley Taylor of Rails Machine has released Machinify, a rake toolkit to help build Rails stacks.
His first out target is Ubuntu since that is what he uses himself but he plans to get this gem up on Rubyforge and encourage other contributions
Chris McAvoy tipped me off that deploying your Rails app to some form of virtual machine is the new meme in the Rails deployment world. He also points to DHH’s request to get thinking about what the ideal Rails VM stack would look like. The follow-up discussion is great with contributions from a variety of experienced Rails deployment experts !
Rails deployment goodies mentioned during the discussions include :-
I was particularly interested in Neil Wilson’s comments in this discussion thread where he suggests waking up a frozen Amazon EC2 image just for a particular customer as and when they need it. As he sees it, this ensures that each customer gets a dedicated Rails application for just as long as they need it and scaling the number of users for each machine typically isn’t an issue.
All in all, Ruby on Rails Stacks looks like a discussion group to watch !
Steve Odom has put a nice little webcast online. Entitled 7 Easy Steps to Rails Deployment on EC2, it shows how to use his Elastic Rails plugin to deploy to an Amazon EC2 instance (in case you hadn’t guessed from the title)
There’s a good article over at the Slicehost wiki which explains how to do an automated Rails deployment with the deprec gem and Capistrano.
While you are at it, you might also want to check out Geoffrey Grosenbach’s screencast on setting up a full Rails stack on Ubuntu using deprec. This is a free screencast which will probably whet your appetite for some of the other TopFunky Peepcode screencasts - I’ve just bought a subscription for them myself and hope to work my through a few over the next couple of weeks as time allows (the Capistrano deployment one is probably most relevant to the topic of this weblog).
And last - but by no means least - I’d recommend Craig Ambrose’s posts on scalable Rails deployment. The comments also lead me to discover a similar setup for Rails, Mongrel and Nginx.
Michael Slater has a handy Capistrano tip over at Technology for Humans.
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