There is a bug in the capistrano git bridge that’s not been patched in the stable version yet.

If you’re getting:

fatal: Could not parse object

A quick and dirty hack is to add a task that just removes your git cache for now on the deployed server with:

desc "Clear that git cache"
task :clear_git_cache do
  run "rm -Rf /#{deploy_base}/#{application}/shared/cached-copy"
end

before "deploy", "clear_git_cache"

It takes about 1 second longer to do the checkout but I don’t really notice.

Capistrano 2.0 doesn’t work with those mongrel recipes we all have nowadays. We scratched our head at some hacks before finding a good solution via the blog world.

Thanks to Megablaix, Inc for posting this code. Works great for us, just tack it onto the end of your deploy.rb and go:

namespace :deploy do
  namespace :mongrel do
    [ :stop, :start, :restart ].each do |t|
      desc "#{t.to_s.capitalize} the mongrel appserver"
      task t, :roles => :app do
        #invoke_command checks the use_sudo
        #variable to determine how to run
        # the mongrel_rails command
        invoke_command "mongrel_rails cluster::#{t.to_s} -C #{mongrel_conf}", :via => run_method
      end
    end
  end

  desc "Custom restart task for mongrel cluster"
  task :restart, :roles => :app, :except =>
       { :no_release => true } do
    deploy.mongrel.restart
  end

  desc "Custom start task for mongrel cluster"
  task :start, :roles => :app do
    deploy.mongrel.start
  end

  desc "Custom stop task for mongrel cluster"
  task :stop, :roles => :app do
    deploy.mongrel.stop
  end
end

]]>