Pablo Cantero

Opening a Rails console with Capistrano 3

16 Jun 2014

Opening a Rails console

To open a Rails console with Capistrano add the snippet below in your config/deploy.rb.

namespace :rails do
  desc 'Open a rails console `cap [staging] rails:console [server_index default: 0]`'
  task :console do
    server = roles(:app)[ARGV[2].to_i]

    puts "Opening a console on: #{server.hostname}…."

    cmd = "ssh #{server.user}@#{server.hostname} -t 'cd #{fetch(:deploy_to)}/current && RAILS_ENV=#{fetch(:rails_env)} bundle exec rails console'"

    puts cmd

    exec cmd
  end
end

Usage:

# To open the first server in the servers list
cap [staging] rails:console

# To open the second server in the servers list
cap [staging] rails:console 1

BONUS 1: Opening a SSH session

desc 'Open ssh `cap [staging] ssh [server_index default: 0]`'
task :ssh do
  server = roles(:app)[ARGV[2].to_i]

  puts "Opening a console on: #{server.hostname}…."

  cmd = "ssh #{server.user}@#{server.hostname}"

  puts cmd

  exec cmd
end

Usage:

# To open the first server in the servers list
cap [staging] ssh

# To open the second server in the servers list
cap [staging] ssh 1

BONUS 2: Opening multiple SSH sessions

Make sure you have csshx installed. On OS X: brew install csshx.

desc 'Open csshx `cap [staging] csshx`'
task :csshx do
  servers = roles(:app).map do |server|
    "#{server.user}@#{server.hostname}"
  end

  cmd = "csshx #{servers.join(' ')}"

  puts cmd

  exec cmd
end

Usage:

cap [staging] csshx