To give a server of the capabilities to auto-update itself and run the latest version of an application code with the latest dependencies is a great feature, very useful, for example, if you are using Amazon auto-scaling, where servers are created and destroyed all the time.

We have solved this issue with Capistrano in our latest project with this hack:

$ ls -1 config/deploy/
local.rb
production.rb
staging.rb

Yes, we have a local stage, with a very simple configuration:

server 'localhost', roles: %w{app web}, user: fetch(:user)

That’s all. Everytime a server is created, it’ll run cap local deploy to have the latest version of the code, gems, and assets installed.