Here is the setup I wanted with Capistrano with my housing app. I wanted to develop locally and continue using Subversion over SSH for source control. Meanwhile, Cap would run svn commands remotely with basic svnserve. My first configuration looked like this:
set :repository, "file:///var/svn/#{application}/trunk"
set :user, "myuser"
My reasoning was that cap would first ssh to my server, and then run
svn checkout file:///var/svn/housing/trunk /path/to/deploy
Since I use a private key to authenticate to my server, I wouldn't need to type my password to start the initial ssh connection, and cap wouldn't need a password to access the repository because it would execute commands on the remote server with "file:///"
It turns out that SCM commands are run locally rather than remotely. The implication is that my ":repository" variable has to be accessible both locally and remotely. With ":repository" set to "file:///" cap tried to determine the revision number by running 'svn info' locally. Of course, this failed miserably because the repository existed on the remote server.
Once I figured this out, I thought it'd be a simple matter of changing the config to say:
set :repository, "svn+ssh://whatcodecraves.com/var/svn/#{application}/trunk"
Now cap will happily run svn locally because it'll work over "svn+ssh://". Unfortunately, this also had a huge flaw. When cap tries to run the checkout command remotely, it'll use "svn+ssh://". But because my private key isn't stored on the server, cap will give three feeble attempts before croaking:
** [208.53.44.43 :: err] Permission denied, please try again.
** [208.53.44.43 :: err] Permission denied, please try again.
** [208.53.44.43 :: err] Permission denied (publickey,password).
** [208.53.44.43 :: err] svn: Connection closed unexpectedly
What's weird about this is that I didn't ask cap to use public key authentication, but it didn't give me any choice in the matter! Crawling the internet yielded a lot of noise about poorly configured repositories or basic explanations about public key authentication. Finally, I came across a response in Capistrano's google group. The fix is damn short:
default_run_options[:pty] = true
I looked up what a pseudo terminal. I don't really see why this provides a fix, but my guess is that setting pty to true creates a new process separate from the original ssh process. Running svn within this new process would default to password authentication after failing to use public key authentication.
This turned out to be an amazing pain to setup. But it did let me step through some of the Capistrano code and appreciate what goes on under the hood. It also teaches me to search their google group rather than doing a general web search.