If you remove the after_symlink, does the Rails application deploy? If I sound unsure, it’s because I am. I haven’t deployed a Rails application to Webfaction for quite a while. I suspect it’s because of how the Document Root is setup in the Apache conf file. But, that’s just my 50,000 foot guess. If I have time this weekend, I’ll try to drop a Rails application via Cap into Webfaction.

desc “Symlink public to what webfaction expects the webroot to be”
task :after_symlink, :roles => :web do
run “ln -nfs #{release_path}/public /home/#{webfaction_username}/webapps/#{application}/”
end

Thanks for the detailed instructions, they have been very helpful. I’m very close to getting a successful deployment except that when I run ‘cap deploy:update’, the svn checkout appears to place my rails app in a directory with the Subversion project name *under* the releases/ directory. Because of that, subsequent tasks to find, for instance, public/images fail.

Any clues? The relevant parts to my deploy.rb are (I believe):

set :application, “saifa”
set :deploy_to, “/home2/#{webfaction_username}/webapps-releases/#{application}”

set :scm, :subversion
set :scm_user, “wpwood”
set :scm_password, Proc.new { Capistrano::CLI.password_prompt(“Subversion password for #{scm_user}: “) }
set :repository, Proc.new { “–username #{scm_user} –password #{scm_password} –no-auth-cache http://my-svn.assembla.com/svn/SaifaDotNet/“}

and I get a /home2/wpwood/webapps-releases/saifa/releases/20090212180231/ directory containing:

log public REVISION SaifaDotNet tmp

I believe that the contents of the SaifaDotNet repository should have been checked out into /home2/wpwood/webapps-releases/saifa/releases/20090212180231/, instead of getting the toplevel SaifaDotNet directory in there.

Any clues?

Thanks,
- Bill

I’m glad my post helped someone save some time.

I have tried all of these. Same error.