I'm a big fan of having an automated deployment process. It's really the web development analog to the "one step build process", as described in the Joel Test. In the past I have used various shell scripts to perform this task, but I have recently become a convert to Capistrano (or "cap" for short). With Capistrano, uploading your code to the test server is as simple as typing cap deploy. When you're ready to launch in production, it's just cap production deploy.

From capify.org:

Simply put, Capistrano is a tool for automating tasks on one or more remote servers. It executes commands in parallel on all targeted machines, and provides a mechanism for rolling back changes across multiple machines.

In detail, here are the features that got me hooked. There's a lot more that cap can do, and I'll describe some more tricks in part 2 of this post.

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