I've been messing around with Capistrano over the last few days. The system is best known for deploying Rails applications, but at its heart it's really just a Ruby-based way of making it easier to manage repetitive server tasks over SSH.

There's one task in particular that I've used it to automate, and which you might find useful, too. Here at EchoDitto we're spread out over a number of offices — DC, Boston, New York, and often who-knows-where-else. This presents some development challenges when collaborating on sites built on a system that, like Drupal, puts alot of site configuration in the database, where version control systems can't be used to manage it.

Of course we do development locally when possible, but we also run a remote dev server to let us collaborate off a single database (and to allow clients to see our work). The obvious solution is to tunnel our local server's database traffic to the central server, allowing different developers' filesystems to connect to the same datastore. But this is slooow.

So other options: setting up MySQL replication? Well, that seems like overkill, and precludes offline development. The solution I've come up with is automating a simple database dump from the dev server. When I need to make config changes I do it on the dev site; when I'm working in the filesystem and need fresh data, I simply invoke a command to pull down the dev DB. For most sites this only takes a few seconds to run, and invoking it is as simple as running `cap get_db` from anywhere within the dev site directory structure.

I used to do this with a somewhat horrible bash script. But it made various assumptions about filesystem and had to be modified for each new local project. Capistrano has let me make this a bit more abstract and reusable. The following script still makes a few assumptions about our servers and configuration, but you might find it useful, too.