Deploy Drupal sites with Capistrano

Setup   
I had a lot of trouble with online recipes not matching the version of Capistrano I had. I settled on Capistrano v2.15.5 since that's what the Blacklight project is using.
You'll Ruby, Capistrano, PHP, MySQL, Git, drush, and a server to run the Drupal site.

Install capistrano:

gem install capistrano
gem install capistrano-ext

Local Directory  

Your development/site building happens here. It could be on a development machine also.

Set up a git repository for the site on https://git.library.cornell.edu/ - example https://git.library.cornell.edu/featureserver_test_library_cornell_edumkdir featureserver_test_library_cornell_edu

cd featureserver_test_library_cornell_edu
git init
touch README
git add README
git commit -m 'first commit'
git remote add origin git@git.library.cornell.edu:featureserver_test_library_cornell_edu.git
git push -u origin master

Set up the local directory

• featureserver_test_library_cornell_edu
  • .git
  • .gitignore
  • README
  • backup/ - place for backup files
  • private_files/ - point Drupal's private file directory at this directory (later)
  • public/ - put your Drupal site here (later)

Here's what .gitignore looks like:

# .gitignore
# Ignore configuration files that may contain sensitive information.
public/sites/*/*settings*.php
!public/sites/*/default.settings.php

# Ignore paths that contain generated content.
cache/
public/sites/default/files
public/sites/default/tmp
private_files

# Ignore .htaccess files since servers want them to be empty
public/.htaccess

Let capistrano create its default files

bash> cd featureserver_test_library_cornell_edu
bash> capify .

Now the directory looks like this:

• featureserver_test_library_cornell_edu
  • .git
  • .gitignore
  • Capfile
  • config
    • deploy.rb
  • README
  • backup/ - place for backup files
  • private_files/ - point Drupal's private file directory at this directory (later)
  • public/ - put your Drupal site here (later)

Server Directory