This plugin to Capistrano will add a timestamped Git tag at each deployment, automatically. It is intended to be used with the multistage recipe and will tag each release by environment. You can, however, use it without multistage simply by setting :branch and :stage in your recipe.

Simply: it makes it so you can track your deployments from Git. If I were to issue the command:

cap production deploy

This would result in one new git tag with the environment and timestamp:

production-2012.04.02-203155

These tags can be used for any number of useful things including generating statistics about deployments per day/week/year, tracking code size over a period of time, detecting Rails migrations, and probably a thousand other things I haven't thought of.

capistrano-deploytags is available on rubygems.org. You can install it from there with:

gem install capistrano-deploytags

If you use Bundler, be sure to add the gem to your Gemfile. In your Capistrano config/deploy.rb you should add:

require 'capistrano-deploytags'

This will create two tasks, one that runs before deployment and one that runs after.

NOTE: You will be creating and pushing tags from the version of the code in the current checkout. This plugin needs to be run from a clean checkout of your codebase. You should be deploying from a clean checkout anyway, so in most cases this is not a restriction on how you already do things. The plugin will check if your code is clean and complain if it is not.

You might find it useful to add this to your ~/.gitconfig in order to get a nice history view of the commits and tags.

[alias]
   lol = log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --graph --decorate

You can then view the list by typing git lol from the checked out code path.

This software was written by Karl Matthias with help from Gavin Heavyside and the support of MyDrive Solutions Limited.

This plugin is released under the BSD two clause license which is available in both the Ruby Gem and the source repository.