Is your deployed rails application frozen to a particular revision? If so, when a new version of rails is released how easy is it for you to upgrade?

Are you living on the edge of rails? If so, how do you move to a more recent revision when you notice an enhancement you want to take advantage of?

Switching to a different version of rails should be easy.

Mike Clark described a number of ways to manage your rails versions in this blog post.

Mike wrote of a “Cadillac Edge Deploy Approach” in referring to Rick Olson’s code that makes managing rails versions quite cinchy.

This plugin is basically a rip-off of that blog post and Rick’s code.

I refactored things a bit primarily because I needed the approach to work even if Rails wasn’t installed on the server I was deploying to. I’ve also changed it since to work with git rather than svn.

To use the plugin, all you need to do is add the following to your deploy.rb:

set :rails_revision, '745359a49452da34978724144eaa318b8a363e08'

When you’d like the server to start using a different revision of rails, just adjust the rails_revision variable.

To install the plugin:

./script/plugin install git://github.com/duff/cadillac_edge_deploy.git