It took me a while - 2 days and a half ! - but I finnaly managed to deploy my application on site5 using capistrano!

The toughest part was understanding this error message:

error: directory is writable by others: (/home/xxxxxx/rails/webapps/xxxx/releases/20070213163348/public)
[warn] FastCGI: (dynamic) server "/home/xxxxx/public_html/xxxxx/dispatch.fcgi"
has failed to remain running for 30 seconds given 3 attempts, its restart interval has been backed off
to 600 seconds

It turned out - as I found in the site5 forum - that site5 has CGI/FCGI configured to shut down scripts that are group- or world-writable. As of 1.3, Capistrano issues a "chmod g+w" command over the entire check-out branch.

The solution was to change the permissions in a :after_update_code task.

The thing is, site5 is cheap but it so sloooooooooow! not sure how long I am going to pay for such a service.

# Capistrano deployment script on site 5
# Jean-Michel Garnier
# Tested with capistrano 1.40 14/02/2007
#
# Inspired by http://fluctisonous.com/2006/11/19/moving-home-with-capistrano-on-site5
# And Kyle Daigle http://forums.asmallorange.com/index.php?showtopic=8892

# Usage:
# the first time: cap setup
# 
# Then to initialize the db the first time- if you have a bootstrap task like in mephisto -
# env BOOTSTRAP=true cap  deploy
# 
# otherwise: cap deploy


# =============================================================================
# Customize these variables
# =============================================================================

set :application, "bicinostrum"

set :user, "your userlogin at site5"            # defaults to the currently logged in user
set :password, "your site5 password"       
set :domain, "21croissants.com"      # your applications domain name
#set :deploy_server, "you.server.name" # the url of your server 


set :public_html, "/home/#{user}/public_html/#{application}"
set :svn_repositoty_home, "rails/svn_repository"
set :rails_apps_home, "rails/webapps"

# =============================================================================
# Do not change these variables
# =============================================================================
set :use_sudo, false
set :rails_env, "production"
set :deploy_to, "/home/#{user}/#{rails_apps_home}/#{application}"
set :repository, "svn+ssh://#{user}@#{domain}/home/#{user}/#{svn_repositoty_home}/#{application}/trunk"

# =============================================================================
# ROLES
# =============================================================================
# You can define any number of roles, each of which contains any number of
# machines. Roles might include such things as :web, or :app, or :db, defining
# what the purpose of each machine is. You can also specify options that can
# be used to single out a specific subset of boxes in a particular role, like
# :primary => true.

role :web, domain
role :app, domain
role :db,  domain

# =============================================================================
# SSH OPTIONS ?
# =============================================================================

set :svn_passphrase, ""
# ssh_options[:port] = 25

# =============================================================================
# TASKS
# =============================================================================
# Define tasks that run on all (or only some) of the machines. You can specify
# a role (or set of roles) that each task should be executed on. You can also
# narrow the set of servers to a subset of a role by specifying options, which
# must match the options given for the servers to select (like :primary => true)

desc "Restart the web server. Overrides the default task for Site5 use"
task :restart, :roles => :app do
run "skill -9 -u#{user} -cdispatch.fcgi"
end

task :after_setup, :roles => :app do
run <<-CMD  
  ln -s /home/#{user}/#{rails_apps_home}/#{application}/current/public/ #{public_html}
CMD
end

task :after_update_code, :roles => :app do
run "find #{release_path}/public -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} \\;"
run "find #{release_path}/public -type f -exec chmod 0644 {} \\;"
run "chmod 0755 #{release_path}/public/dispatch.*"

if ENV['BOOTSTRAP']
  run <<-EOF
    cd #{release_path} && rake db:bootstrap RAILS_ENV=production
    EOF
else
  run <<-EOF
    cd #{release_path} && rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production
    EOF
end
end