How can I improve our current deployment workflow (with Capistrano)?

Our team works on a high-traffic site where we use 开发者_运维百科Capistrano to deploy our Rails apps running on Ubuntu/Apache/Passenger. We have load balancing setup, so our current procedure to minimize downtime and avoid having customers see Rails' 500 page is as follows (assuming only 2 production servers, just for this example):

• Turn Apache off on production_1 (Load balancing now send all requests to production_2)
• Deploy to 1st server: cap production_1 deploy (turns Apache on at the end of deploy)
• Do some basic tests to ensure nothing went funky
• If something went wrong, turn Apache off and rollback

Then, I follow that procedure for the production_2 server.

As you can see, this is painful, so I'm looking for a better way. Not to mention the fact that we have more servers and will be adding even more soon.

What alternatives are available?

Thanks!

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yes, you can have different environments called "production_0", "production_1" and use capistrano-ext to provide multistage deployment. the run them as following:

1. cap production_0 deploy
2. cap production_1 deploy

please take a look at Github pages howto setup multistage deployment