How do I execute a Capistrano task locally?

Question

I have defined a custom Capistrano task that's supposed to run locally (on my development machine):

desc "Push code to Dreamhost"
task :push do
  run "git push dreamhost"
end

however when I try to run cap push it executes it on the remote machine, ie.

* executing `push'
* executing "git push dreamhost"
  servers: ["ec2-999-99-999-999.compute-1.amazonaws.com"]

how do I get it to execute locally instead?

Why do you want it to be a capistrano task instead of a regular rake task? — KL-7, Jan 01 '12 at 10:23
I actually want to do it in `before :deploy`, and that gives the same problem (tries to execute on remote server). — Daniel, Jan 01 '12 at 10:42

score 89 · Answer 1 · edited Dec 12 '13 at 22:24

89

Or use run_locally to run natively with Capistrano, and still get proper logging and all that good stuff

edited Dec 12 '13 at 22:24

jeffbyrnes

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answered Feb 24 '12 at 21:20

patcon

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Can you elaborate on how to use this? – Steve Bennett Jan 07 '13 at 02:13

score 17 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 01 '12 at 10:45

17

I suggest using :

system("git push dreamhost")

or

output = %x[git push dreamhost]

That's just plain Ruby !

answered Jan 01 '12 at 10:45

Cydonia7

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I found that run_locally didn't show me the output but system did – RidingTheRails Oct 20 '12 at 10:52
2

Please note that `system` won't abort your current task if it fails. So you might want to use `run_locally` instead as @patcon suggests. – Besi Jul 16 '13 at 12:18

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 22 '13 at 22:21

For the commenter that mentioned run_locally doesn't show output, you have to dump the output to a variable and then print it to see it. Like this:

task :testing_run_locally do
    output = run_locally "hostname"
    puts "OUTPUT: " + output
end

The downside is you won't see any output until the command has finished. Not a big deal for commands that don't run long but something that runs for several minutes will cause the deploy to appear like it is hung until it finishes. There is an open pull request for Capistrano that adds real time command output to run_locally: https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano/pull/285

or even simpler: `puts run_locally "hostname"` – iurii Dec 13 '13 at 16:11 — iurii, Dec 13 '13 at 16:11

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 03 '12 at 16:41

1

You can also use:

require 'rake'     # Access to sh command
[...]
desc "Push code to Dreamhost"
task :push do
   sh "git push dreamhost"
end

answered Jan 03 '12 at 16:41

Sebastien Varrette

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How do I execute a Capistrano task locally?

4 Answers4

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