Question

I’m loving how capistrano has simplified my deployment workflow, but often times a pushed change will run into issues that I need to log into the server to troubleshoot via the console.

Is there a way to use capistrano or another remote administration tool to interact with the rails console on a server from your local terminal?

**Update:

cap shell seems promising, but it hangs when you try to start the console:

cap> cd /path/to/application/current
cap> pwd
 ** [out :: application.com] /path/to/application/current
cap> rails c production
 ** [out :: application.com] Loading production environment (Rails 3.0.0)
 ** [out :: application.com] Switch to inspect mode.

if you know a workaround for this, that’d be great

Answer 1

I found pretty nice solution based on https://github.com/codesnik/rails-recipes/blob/master/lib/rails-recipes/console.rb

desc "Remote console" 
task :console, :roles => :app do
  env = stage || "production"
  server = find_servers(:roles => [:app]).first
  run_with_tty server, %W( ./script/rails console #{env} )
end

desc "Remote dbconsole" 
task :dbconsole, :roles => :app do
  env = stage || "production"
  server = find_servers(:roles => [:app]).first
  run_with_tty server, %W( ./script/rails dbconsole #{env} )
end

def run_with_tty(server, cmd)
  # looks like total pizdets
  command = []
  command += %W( ssh -t #{gateway} -l #{self[:gateway_user] || self[:user]} ) if     self[:gateway]
  command += %W( ssh -t )
  command += %W( -p #{server.port}) if server.port
  command += %W( -l #{user} #{server.host} )
  command += %W( cd #{current_path} )
  # have to escape this once if running via double ssh
  command += [self[:gateway] ? '\&\&' : '&&']
  command += Array(cmd)
  system *command
end