http://www.whatcodecraves.com/articles/2008/08/12/picking_at_capistrano

Another little useful tool for OS X is the Passenger prefpane. It’s not hard to do the Apache configs yourself, but I liked having this for development.

namespace :deploy do
%w(start restart).each { |name| task name, :roles => :app do passenger.restart end }
end

See:

http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/5466

It seems (perhaps if you have an older setup of rails that has been upgraded a few times) that you’ll have a reaper and spawner and other scripts in the script/process/ directory. Capistrano will try to run reaper on a deploy if it exists. I suppose there are two ways around this, first just delete reaper (I didn’t test this), or taking a leaf from the mongrel_cluster gem, override what deploy.restart does. To do this just replace the entire Passenger section in the above code with:

#############################################################
# Passenger
#############################################################

namespace :passenger do
desc “Restart Application”
task :restart, :roles => :app do
run “touch #{current_path}/tmp/restart.txt”
end
end

namespace :deploy do
desc “Restart the Passenger system.”
task :restart, :roles => :app do
passenger.restart
end
end

———————————–

This way you don’t even have to call a passenger restart, it’ll just happen as part of a normal deploy.

set :scm_username, “username”
set :scm_password, “password”

Once this was done, it gave me an error about executing script/process/reaper, but I see that the release was still created on the server, and the ‘current’ symlink updated. Just thought I’d point this out for those who have a problem.