Question

I want to pull the last modified file from a directory. This capistrano task works locally just fine, but how do I make this run on the server so I can pull the servers data?

namespace :pull do
  desc "Hello Pull data from the server"
  task :hello, roles: :db do
    ## Want this to return what's on the server. Not locally.
    puts "Getting filename of last created database backup"
    db_backups_directory_path = "/home/deployer/backups"
    last_db_backup_archived = Dir.glob(File.join(db_backups_directory_path, '*')).
                              select  {|f| File.file? f }.
                              sort_by {|f| File.mtime f }.
                              last
    puts last_db_backup_archived
  end
end

Answer 1

I’d just go with run. Capistrano executes commands in parallel over a bunch of servers, so you’ll have to translate your ruby into shell code. Thankfully, in your case it’s more or less a straightforward translation.

task :hello, roles: :db do
  ## Want this to return what's on the server. Not locally.
  puts "Getting filename of last created database backup"
  db_backups_directory_path = "/home/deployer/backups"
  run <<-CMD
     find #{db_backups_directory_path} -type f -printf '%A@ %p\n'|
     sort -n | tail -n1 | cut -d" "  -f2
  CMD
end