Yes it was symbolic links. I resolved this by copying over the uploaded files to the new releases directory before recreating the symbolic link in the Capfile.

Thanks for the idea!

Interesting. I don’t expect Capistrano to touch anything other than the directories it sets up (current, releases, shared). Are you uploading into a directory that current is symlinked to – thus, when you deploy again, the current symlink changes and your files disappear into releases?

I have a git configuration that’s very similar to yours.

set :scm, :git
set :repository, “git://github.com/atc/atc.git”
set :git_shallow_clone, 1
set :short_branch, “master”
set :user, “#{webfaction_username}”
set :use_sudo, false

To install git on webfaction follow these instructions: http://docs.webfaction.com/software/git.html#installing-git.

If using git you might want to add a custom path to your Capfile so that Capistrano can find git (by default installed in ~/bin/git). Add something like this line before your task defs:

default_environment["PATH"] = “/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/home/#{webfaction_username}/bin:/home/#{webfaction_username}/.gem/ruby/1.8/bin”

namespace :deploy do
…

If you were just using sqlite3, you’d want to set the following:

set :webfaction_db_type, “sqlite3″
set :webfaction_db, “db/name_of_database” (where name_of_database is the name of your db)

I’m pretty sure if you have empty values for the other options, Rails will just ignore them.

thanks.