Allow a different local and remote subversion repository path for Capistrano

Jim Morris — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 14:04:28 -0800

One of the things that bugs me about Capistrano is the requirement that access to the remote subversion repository have the same path from the local machine and the remote machine. This is never the case in my experience.

I have been getting around it by setting the path to svn://localhost/... and running ssh locally to port forward the SVN port to the remote host. This sucks as I usually forget to run ssh in another window first.

So I added an optional configuration variable to be set in deploy.rb called local_repository_path, so now you set the repository path as normal, which is the path the remote server uses to access the SVN repository, and you set the path that the local machine (your workstation) uses to access the same repository...

set :repository, "svn://localhost/#{application}/trunk"
        set :local_repository_path, "svn+ssh://myremotehost.com/path/to/repostitory/#{application}/trunk"

Ideally one would patch the Capistrano distribution to achieve this, but thanks to the magic of ruby you can patch it from your own setup so I put the following into lib/tasks/patch_capistrano.rb

        # Patch the svn scm to allow a local svn repository path as well as
        # the remote one as most systems I use have a different path depending
        # on whether you access svn from the local machine or remote machine
        
          module Capistrano
        
            # override the two scm methods that access svn from the local machine
            module SCM
        
              class Subversion
                # Return an integer identifying the last known revision in the svn
                # repository. (This integer is currently the revision number.)
                def latest_revision
                  @latest_revision ||= begin
                    configuration.logger.debug "querying latest revision..."
                    match = svn_log(configuration[:local_repository_path]).scan(/r(\d+)/).first or
                    raise "Could not determine latest revision"
                    match.first
                  end
                end
        
                # Return a string containing the diff between the two revisions. +from+
                # and +to+ may be in any format that svn recognizes as a valid revision
                # identifier. If +from+ is +nil+, it defaults to the last deployed
                # revision. If +to+ is +nil+, it defaults to HEAD.
                def diff(actor, from=nil, to=nil)
                  from ||= current_revision(actor)
                  to ||= "HEAD"
                  `svn diff #{configuration[:local_repository_path]}@#{from} #{configuration[:local_repository_path]}@#{to}`
                end
        
              end
            end
        
          end

Then simply add this line to your config/deploy.rb...

require 'lib/tasks/patch_capistrano'

and everything works fine now.

Note there are only two scm methods that access SVN from the local machine, latest_revision and diff. I have patched both.

I'll tidy this up, make the default for local_repository_path be repository, and submit the patch to the Capistrano folks, who will hopefully commit it to the source code, as it won't affect existing users, but will make the rest of us a little happier.

"Allow a different local and remote subversion repository path for Capistrano" by Marcelo

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 10:13:11 -0800

Thanks a lot!

"Allow a different local and remote subversion repository path for Capistrano" by Rob Dupuis

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 06:48:17 -0700

When reading variable xxx In capistrano 2.1 (poss 2.0 too?) the scm recipes check for a` local_xxx` equivalent. So you can just use `:local_repository` if you need to configure a different local repo url.

"Allow a different local and remote subversion repository path for Capistrano" by jxh

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 20:42:55 -0800

To clarify that bit about "local": For the case where your desktop needs to reach svn with ssh, but the svn repository happens to be on the same machine where you're deploying your app, your `deploy.rb` needs to look something like this: set :repository, "file:///home/svn/main/rails/myapp" set :local_repository, "svn+ssh://myserver.my.domain/main/rails/myapp" Note the underscore needed after "local".

"Allow a different local and remote subversion repository path for Capistrano" by wolfmanjm

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 20:57:56 -0800

I fixed it in the Dupuis comment. Please note that Capistrano 2 has a completely different way of doing things.

Wolfmans Howlings: Allow a different local and remote subversion repository path for Capistrano

Allow a different local and remote subversion repository path for Capistrano

"Allow a different local and remote subversion repository path for Capistrano" by Marcelo

"Allow a different local and remote subversion repository path for Capistrano" by Rob Dupuis

"Allow a different local and remote subversion repository path for Capistrano" by jxh

"Allow a different local and remote subversion repository path for Capistrano" by wolfmanjm