In my last Git, Capistrano, SSH, and WordPress tutorial, I showed you how to setup your WordPress theme to be easily deployable. Now, I’ve simplified the process even more by eliminating a large amount of duplicate code.

I recently published my first Ruby Gem, capistrano-wordpress (source). This gem adds a new “recipe” that is available to any Capistrano deploy script. So now, our deploy script from the last tutorial becomes this:

set :user,            'yourusername'
set :domain,          'yourdomain.com'
set :application,     domain # in the off chance that this doesn't match your domain, just specify it
set :theme_name,      'yourthemename' # your theme name here

role :web,            domain
role :app,            domain
role :db,             domain

require 'capistrano_wordpress'

This Gem takes a few assumptions into consideration. Firstly, these are your deploy paths:

set :appdir,               	"/home/#{user}/deployments/#{application}"
set :deploy_to,            	"/home/#{user}/#{domain}/wp-content/themes/"
set :releases_path,        	"/home/#{user}/cap/#{domain}/releases/"
set :shared_path,          	"/home/#{user}/cap/#{domain}/shared/"

And these are your repository paths:

set :local_repository,      "ssh://#{user}@#{domain}/~/git/#{application}.git"
set :repository,            "/home/#{user}/git/#{application}.git"

I do plan on upgraded the gem to allow you to properly override these variables (using _cset), but I was having a lot of issues while doing so (it may take some time). I will announce when I make the update, and I will also revise this post.

Another thing to keep in mind: make sure that you include the require ‘capistrano_wordpress’ line and that it is at the bottom of your deploy script.

This gem works wonders when you are consistently deploying to similar server setups (in my case, Dreamhost shared-hosting).

To-Do

There are a lot of other things that I would like to see from this gem, and I will try to add them when I can. If you would like to help, you can visit the gem’s source code and create a branch. Features I would like to see:

• Automate generation of SSH keys if none are present.
• Automate setup of Git repository.
• Allow overriding of all variables in the deploy script
• Add the ability to do a deploy:commit_and_deploy –m “Commit message” all from the capistrano script (simplifies the one-click deploy scripts in the last tutorial, and it also makes it easier to commit and deploy from the terminal).