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.

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 a local development directory that will correspond to the git repo

Set up the local directory

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

Set up capistrano with the multistage features

Server Directory