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I'm proud to announce Webistrano 1.3!

Webistrano is a Web UI for managing Capistrano deployments. It lets you manage projects and their stages like test, production, and staging with different settings. Those stages can then be deployed with Capistrano through Webistrano.

The 1.3 adds several new shiny features to Webistrano that make deployment easier:

• Better Git support through Capistrano 2.2
• Support for Phusion Passenger / mod_rails
• Ability to temporary disable hosts for a deployment
• A command-line interface with script/deploy
• A simple permission system

The complete changelog is available through the Webistrano project site.

One very often demanded feature is the ability to temporary disable a host for a deployment. This is helpful when you want to deploy a stage without changing the stage configuration even if one or more hosts are down:

Another scenario is when you want to execute a task only on a limited set of servers.

The script/deploy command is a nice little gem, especially useful if you want to script Webistrano:

$ ruby script/deploy 
Usage: deploy [options] project stage
    -h, --help                       This message
    -e, --environment=ENV            RAILS_ENV for Webistrano (default: production)
    -u, --username=NAME              Webistrano username to use (default: admin)
    -t, --task=NAME                  Capistrano task to invoke (default: deploy)
    -d, --description=TEXT           Deployment comment for Webistrano records

Further, Webistrano now offers built-in tasks for managing mod_rails deployments. It will override the default deploy tasks and ask for the necessary configuration entries so that using mod_rails becomes even easier.

Upgrading from previous releases is very easy, see the Upgrading wiki page.

Webistrano 1.3 can be downloaded here. Webistrano is BSD-licensed and the project site is open for everybody. Please see the project page for more documentation and screenshots. There are even some screencasts.

I'm happy to announce the release of Webistrano - a Web UI for managing Capistrano deployments.

Webistrano is an internal application that I developed at Peritor for the easy handling of Capistrano deployments. I often had situations where our designer updated some images and wanted to update/deploy our Rails project. Capistrano offers a nice command line interface for doing this but this is not the right tool for a designer, especially if you have a complicated multi-stage environment with production, staging and test settings.

Further we wanted to be able to keep track of who deployed what when to which servers.

This is where Webistrano enters the stage.

Webistrano is a Ruby on Rails application that manages projects with their different stages (like production or testing) and leverages Capistrano to handle the deployment part. This way it is very easy to handle multi-stage and multi-client situations and keep an eye on all deployments. It further includes a simple email alerting system so that you get pinged if somebody deploys to the production servers.

We are using Webistrano for quite some time now and it has proven stable for our needs. I am releasing it under the BSD license. The Subversion repository is located at Rubyforge.

On the project page you can find two screencasts that show you how to get Webistrano running and explain some advanced concepts.

Version 1.0 can be downloaded here:
Make sure to watch the screencasts:

I presented Webistrano last month at the Berlin Ruby User Group (then under the name 'Webcap') and the feedback was quite positive. I'd love to hear your feedback and suggestions.

UPDATE:
There was a problem with the Mephisto comment system that resulted in all posted comment being posted to /dev/null. The problem is fixed now, please re-submit your comments.