Alright, we’re nearing the finish line! Capistrano 2.0 Preview Release #3 is now available.

Capistrano is a utility for automating the execution of tasks on one or more remote machines. You can read all about it at www.capify.org.

To install Preview #3, you’ll need to grab it from the Rails beta gem server:

gem install -s http://gems.rubyonrails.org capistrano

Accompanying PR3 is a new page of documentation on the capify.org site: Capistrano Basics. This walks you through the major features of Capistrano, but does not touch on deployment. This makes it a great introduction for those wanting to use Capistrano in non-deployment scenarios.

Preview #3 includes the following changes and enchancements:

Feature: Mercurial and CVS are now supported out of the box. Just set your :scm variable to :mercurial or :cvs, like so:

set :scm, :mercurial
# or
set :scm, :cvs

Thanks to Tobias Luetke and Matthew Elder for the Mercurial module, and Brian Phillips for the CVS module.

Feature: There is now a :default_environment variable, which is a hash that can be used to set environment variables that should be present for all commands that are executed. For instance:

default_environment["PATH"] =
  "/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/home/jamis/bin"

Feature: All commands are now explicitly invoked via “sh”, which means that even if your default user shell is non-POSIX (e.g., tcsh, csh, etc.), you can use Capistrano just fine. Note that if you were using tcsh or csh syntax in your Capistrano scripts, you now need to set the :default_shell variable to use your (non-POSIX) shell of choice:

set :default_shell, "/usr/bin/tcsh"

Feature: You can declare empty roles, and Capistrano won’t complain. This is useful for predeclaring roles that need to exist (because task definitions depend on them), but which might not have any servers in them (depending on runtime conditions).

Feature: A username and port specified with the server definition (e.g., “fred@some.server.com:1234”) now take precedence over the :username and :port settings in the ssh_options hash, rather than the other way around. This lets you set a general default via ssh_options, and override on a per-server basis in the server definitions themselves.

There are several other minor changes and fixes as well; you can read the CHANGELOG for all the gory details.