Rob Seaman

It's often helpful to be able to bring MySQL production data down to a development machine. I wanted to do this for my Mephisto blog engine (see gitting Started with Mephisto and Deploying Mephisto with Capistrano to DreamHost) so that I could see how changes would look with existing data before deploying an update. Production data is also useful for tracking down bugs with production data and for backups. This post describes the Capistrano namespace I created for doing this. Read the rest of this entry

I was using Capistrano 2.5.2 to run a MySQL dump on a deployment target and what started as a simple implementation to prevent the command line password from showing up in the Capistrano log evolved into a research effort about the security of using passwords on the MySQL command line. This post describes how to suppress run execution lines from showing up in the Capistrano log, the real risks with using passwords on the MySQL command line and how to use Capistrano to avoid command line passwords without putting the password in a ~/.my.cnf file. Read the rest of this entry