Capistrano is a wonderful tool for deploying Ruby on Rails (and other) applications. But having to enter your password over and over again for each step in a deployment gets old quickly.

In a previous article, I described how to set up SSH keys so you don’t have to enter your password for most operations. However, after the Capistrano deploy process does most of its work, it uses a sudo command to restart the application, and this requires you to type in your password. As a result, “cap deploy” is not a true “type the command and walk away” deployment process, even with SSH keys set up. You have to wait until the process is nearly done, so you can enter the password to restart the server.

A simple improvement is to enter:

cap deploy -p - 

The “-p” option tells Capistrano you want to provide a password, and the following hyphen tells it to prompt you for the password (which is more secure than entering the password on the command line). This way you can enter the password right at the start of the deployment process, and then it will complete without intervention.