Capistrano - How to put files in the shared folder?

I am new to Capistranoand I saw there is shared folder and also option :linked_files. I think shared folder is used to keep files between releases. But my question is, how do files end up being in the shared folder?

Also, if I want to symlink another directory to the current directory e.g. static folder at some path, how do I put it at the linked_dirs ?

Lastly how to set chmod 755 to linked_files and linked_dirs.

Thank you.

Folders inside your app are symlinks to folders in the shared directory. If your app writes to log/production.log, it will actually write to ../shared/log/production.log. That's how the files end up being in the shared folder.

You can see how this works by looking at the feature specs or tests in Capistrano.

If you want to chmod these shared files, you can just do it once directly over ssh since they won't ever be modified by Capistrano after they've been created.

To add a linked directory, in your deploy.rb:

set :linked_dirs, %w{bin log tmp/backup tmp/pids tmp/cache tmp/sockets vendor/bundle}

or

set :linked_dirs, fetch(:linked_dirs) + %w{public/system}

Capistrano 3.5+

Capistrano 3.5 introduced append for array fields. From the official docs, you should use these:

For Shared Files:

append :linked_files, %w{config/database.yml}

For Shared Directories:

append :linked_dirs, %w{bin log public/uploads vendor/bundle}

I've written a task for Capistrano 3 to upload your config files to the shared folder of each of your servers, it'll check these directories in order:

1. config/deploy/config/:stage/*.yml
2. config/deploy/config/*.yml

And upload all config files found. It'll only upload the files if they've changed. Note also that if you have the same file on both directories then the second one will be ignored.

Here's the code: https://gist.github.com/Jesus/448d618c83fb0445ebbf

One last thing, this task is just uploading the config. files to your remote shared folder, you still need to set linked_files in config/deploy.rb, eg:

set :linked_files, %w{config/database.yml config/aws.yml}

UPDATE:

If you're using Git, you'll probably want to ignore these files:

echo "config/deploy/config/*" >> .gitignore