The Buckblog

I’m almost ready to do a preview release of the next Capistrano version, which is built on top of the new Net::SSH library. To do that, though, I need to prime the pump by pushing out a few small fixes to Net::SSH. So, behold!

Net::SSH 2.0 Preview Release #4 (1.99.3):

gem install --source http://gems.jamisbuck.org net-ssh

This release has two minor new features and two fixed bugs:

• Make sure HOME is set to something sane, even on OS’s that don’t set it by default. This makes things work a little better on Windows than before. (Ahem…any windows users out there that want to start playing with Net::SSH…I’d love to hear from you how it does.)

• Add a :passphrase option to specify the passphrase to use with private keys. This lets you use encrypted keys without interaction (though since it requires you to hard-code the passphrase in your script…it kind of makes it pointless to use an encrypted key. Still, I’ve had lots of requests for this, and Francis Sullivan finally provided a patch).

• BUG FIX: a new auth-agent connection will now be opened for every auth-agent channel request, rather than reusing a single auth-agent connection. This fixes some rather bizarre errors on some hosts.

• BUG FIX: explicitly provided keys (those given via the :keys option) are now loaded correctly, thanks to some timely File.expand_path’ing provided in a patch from Thomas Hudson.

Net::SSH::Multi 1.0 Preview Release #2 (0.99.1)

Unrelated to Capistrano (since the next release of cap won’t be using it), I’m also pushing out a second preview release of Net::SSH::Multi, a library for managing multiple Net::SSH connections in parallel.

gem install --source http://gems.jamisbuck.org net-ssh-multi

This release has a single bug fix:

• BUG FIX: don’t try to do IO.select on closed streams. This fixes a problem related to auth-agent channels getting closed and causing the parallel session processing to blow up.

Capistrano 2.3.0 preview release?

I’ll hopefully have a preview release for the next Capistrano version next week sometime. It’s close! I’m using it myself, locally, but I want to try it on a few more deploys to make sure it really works as advertised. I haven’t actually run any timings on it, but Capistrano with Net::SSH v2 feels significantly faster than it was on Net::SSH 1.x. Stay tuned!