I created a rails plugin to help me keep clients up to date on the status of projects. This post is an update to the original svn_messages plugin.

The plugin now uses capistrano 2 (Multistage). I use it in 2 instances - whenever I deploy a site, and whenever I send a weekly status report. For a deployment, this is what I type at the command line:

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cap staging svn:deployment_report

This gives me the following output:

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Deployment to staging (Revision 34)
I deployed the latest.  It includes:

* Started adding user registration system. (domelia)
* Now translating validation errors and their attribute names. (bjones)
* Reorganized views a bit. (domelia)
* Now sending activation email when user signs up. (fsmith)
* Added support for "remember me" when logging in. (domelia)

I could have also typed:

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cap production svn:deployment_report

For a weekly status report, I type the following:

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cap svn:messages r=70 u=domelia

70 is the oldest subversion revision I care about. domelia is me. I specify this because I only care about the svn commits that I personally made. This gives me the following output:

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* Started adding user registration system.
* Reorganized views a bit.
* Added support for "remember me" when logging in.

I like the plugin because I can keep clients up to date and spend very little time doing it.

To install:

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svn export https://terralien.devguard.com/svn/projects/plugins/svn_messages vendor/plugins/svn_messages

If you’d like this deployment report to happen every time you deploy, you can add the folllowing to your deploy.rb:

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before  "deploy:update_code", "svn:deployment_report"