WallerDev

When deploying with capistrano, using git, and rails as a submodule in vendor/rails, you might run into the following error:

** [out :: domain] (in /var/www/apps/domain/releases/20080730043012)
** [out :: domain] rake aborted!
** [out :: domain] no such file to load –/var/www/apps/domain/releases/20080730043012/config/../vendor/rails/railties/lib/initializer
** [out :: domain] /var/www/apps/domain/releases/20080730043012/Rakefile:4
** [out :: domain] (See full trace by running task with –trace)

When you check to see why it can’t find the file you’ll see /vendor/rails is empty. Once you understand why it’s empty (because it’s a git submodule), you’ll realize that capistrano isn’t doing the necessary commands to initialize that submodule. These commands are:

git submodule init
git submodule update

Luckily, capistrano has added support for this by using the following in your deploy.rb.

set :git_enable_submodules, true

That will cause capistrano to execute the necessary commands for submodules:

if configuration[:git_enable_submodules]
  execute << "#{git} submodule #{verbose} init"
  execute << "#{git} submodule #{verbose} update"
end