How to define multiple users in a Capistrano deployment file

We’re just starting to get into Ruby on Rails at my work, and we’re close to deploying our first application to a production server with Capistrano.

Capistrano makes it easy for developers to deploy code to the production server from their own workstations. But we quickly ran into two problems:

1. It’s often the case that a developer’s username on their local workstation is different from their username on the production server. This requires you to set the developer’s server username in the “deploy.rb” file. Hard-coded.
2. Hard-coding a single username makes it difficult for multiple users to share a “deploy.rb” file.

Well, it turns out that Capistrano is better than all that. With a little bit of conditional logic and the ability for Cap to read environment variables, the problem is solved like this in the “deploy.rb” file:

if ENV["USER"] == "robert"
    set :user, "bob"
elsif ENV["USER"] == "elizabeth"
    set :user, "beth"
end

Voila.