Question

I am using Capistrano to deploy my Rails application. whenever I deploy, changes would not be reflected on the browser, and I still need to restart nginx to update the site (running sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart). I’m not really sure why but isn’t it supposed to be updated after restarting application? (using touch /app/tmp/restart.txt)

Here’s my deploy.rb

require "rvm/capistrano"
set :rvm_ruby_string, 'ruby-1.9.3-p194@app_name'
set :rvm_type, :user

require "bundler/capistrano"

set :application, "app_name"
set :user, "me"

set :deploy_to, "/home/#{user}/#{application}"
set :deploy_via, :copy

set :use_sudo, false

set :scm, :git
set :repository,  "~/Sites/#{application}/.git"
set :branch, "master"

role :web, '1.2.3.4'
role :app, '1.2.3.4'
role :db,  '1.2.3.4', :primary => true
role :db,  '1.2.3.4'

namespace :deploy do
 task :start do ; end
 task :stop do ; end
 task :restart, :roles => :app, :except => { :no_release => true } do
   run "#{try_sudo} touch #{File.join(current_path,'tmp','restart.txt')}"
 end
end

Answer 1

I realized that the deployment setup matches
http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/06/28/setup-a-ubuntu-vps-for-hosting-ruby-on-rails-applications-2/

When I followed this tutorial(about a year ago), I installed slightly newer versions of nginx and passenger. From what I remember, I think these newer versions prompted me to use nginx as a service when I ran any type of init.d command. (Ubuntu 10.04)

Anyways I would switch out the code

run "#{try_sudo} touch #{File.join(current_path,'tmp','restart.txt')}"

to

run "#{sudo} service nginx #{command}"

And see if that works.