I’ve put together a Capistrano recipe based on a Capfile put together by Geoffrey Grosenbach. Here it is, and any suggestions left in the comments are most appreciated.

Requirements

• A legally obtained Mint license
• A Ruby on Rails app
• Capistrano 2 preview 2 (Read more about it on Jamis Buck’s blog)
• Knowledge of the command line

# Capistrano recipe for deploying Mint. Based on code from Geoffrey Grosenbach's
# post on the Mint forums: http://haveamint.com/forum/after_dinner/666/deploy_mint_with_capistrano#post_4108
# Slight modifications by Pat Nakajima.
require 'capistrano/recipes/deploy/strategy'

namespace :deploy do
  namespace :mint do

    # Set your svn user here
    set :user, "deploy" 

    # This should be the path to your app's shared folder. You need to keep a copy
    # of Mint's db.php configuration file in the config/ directory. This will be 
    # copied to your Mint deployment so as to avoid transmitting that material.
    set :app_shared, "/var/www/apps/#{application}/shared" 

    # Where is Mint? Set the location of Mint in your repository.
    set :mint_repository,  "http://your_repository/mint" 

    # Where do you want Mint? I put mine in a separate mints folder.
    # Your mileage may vary.
    set :mint_deploy_to, "/var/www/mints/#{application}" 

    # This can be commented out after the first deployment if you wish to use another
    # strategy for deployment.
    set :mint_deploy_via, :checkout

    before "deploy:mint:update_code", "deploy:mint:set_vars" 
    # Sets variables to traditional names
    task :set_vars do
      set :repository, mint_repository
      set :deploy_to, mint_deploy_to
      set :deploy_via, mint_deploy_via
    end

    # TODO Refactor to not rewrite default deployment task
    desc "Deploy Mint stats tracking." 
    task :default do
      update_code
      symlink
    end

    task :update_code, :except => { :no_release => true } do
      on_rollback { run "rm -rf #{release_path}; true" }
      strategy.deploy!
      finalize_update
    end

    # Overridden since PHP doesn't have some of the Rails directories
    task :finalize_update, :except => { :no_release => true } do
      # Make directories writeable by the deployment user's group
      run "chmod -R g+w #{release_path}" if fetch(:group_writable, true)
    end

    # Symlinks 
    task :symlink, :except => { :no_release => true } do
      on_rollback { run "rm -f #{current_path}; ln -s #{previous_release} #{current_path}; true" }
      run "rm -f #{current_path} && ln -s #{release_path} #{current_path}" 
    end

    task :restart, :roles => :app do
      # Do nothing
    end

    # Copy db files
    after "deploy:mint:update_code", "deploy:mint:copy_db_config" 
    task :copy_db_config, :roles => :app do
      run "cp #{app_shared}/config/db.php #{release_path}/config/db.php" 
      run "chmod -R 775 #{release_path}/config/db.php" 
    end

    # Post-deploy cleanup
    task :after_default, :roles => :app do
      # Keep last 5 releases
      deploy.cleanup
    end

  end
end

Usage

Once you add it to your Capfile, you can run the following command to deploy:

cap deploy:mint

Notes

There are a few “gotchas” for this recipe:

• Apache configuration is up to you for the time being. Setting up a virtualhost should be as easy as adding one to your apache cong/apps directory. I’ll write more on this later.
• You need to have a copy of Mint’s db.php file in your Rails app’s shared/config folder. This is intended to limit the number of times you have to send that kind of info.
• You might have to finagle the permissions for your deploy folder.

In the Rails development community, you often hear the notion of opinionated software. Well this recipe, for now at least, is probably the most close-minded thing you’ve seen in a while. Still, I’ve been using it to deploy Mint for this blog, so I know it works, albeit with above stipulations.