Question

I already have a production instance deployed on the server. Its working well.

Here is what I need to do.
Deploy a staging and Development environment on the server.
I have already created a branch in github to do that.

Config
1) Ruby 1.8.6
2) Rails is being vendored
3) Webserver Nginx and Thin
4) I have already create a file under /usr/local/nginx/sites-enabled and sites-available folders
5) Added yml file under /etc/thin
6) Made edits to the deploy.rb and have added dev.rb under the config and deploy folders
7) Capistrano is being used on the server for deploy

Questions:
How to deploy the dev environment from separate github branch different that production ? Will that reboot/affect the current production environment too ?

I want to make sure the production wont get affected by this. Please provide a list of commands
or tutorials that will help me with this. I am into very early stages of of learning ROR so please be
a little details. Help is very much appreciated.

EDIT:
1) Capify the project by installing the gem locally and running capify locally.
2) Make changes to you deploy.rb under config
3) set :stages with staging and production
4) set :default_stage as staging .. You have to edit this file more to customize your deployment
5) Under config/deploy/ : Create you production and staging “.rb” files. set the branch to master or any specific branch. Set your rails_env to staging in staging.rb and to production in production.rb.
Set deploy_to as xxxpath/staging and xxxpath/production in those appropriate files.
6) cap deploy will deploy in staging as default due to 4)
7) cap production deploy for production

Answer 1

It looks like you’re most of the way there. The key will be to ensure that Capistrano deploys each branch to a separate location on the filesystem — the sites-available document roots should be different (in other words, don’t overwrite your production files!).

Two methods, if you have set stable production, staging and development branches, use the method documented here http://help.github.com/deploy-with-capistrano/

You can use this method for one-off branch deployments Using capistrano to deploy from different git branches.

Passenger looks for the file tmp/restart.txt to know when to restart; this is under the application tree so should only affect the specific variant of the site.

Depending on your server’s capacity, the production site may suffer a brief performance hit from the restart of another environment. When you are able, you should consider getting a separate server for staging, test, dev, etc.