Installation

Capistrano only needs to be installed on the computer where you plan to invoke it. Your remote servers do not need to have Capistrano installed, unless you want to invoke Capistrano from them.

Typically, you'll just install Capistrano on your workstation, and call it good.

Ruby

Currently, Capistrano only works with the official Ruby interpreter. Instructions for downloading and installing it on a variety of platforms are available here:

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/

Capistrano will not work on versions of Ruby prior to 1.8. It is highly recommended that you use Ruby 1.8.2 or later.

Important: if you are using a Ruby distribution that breaks the interpreter into smaller pieces and requires you to install them all separately, be sure that you have Ruby's OpenSSL bindings installed!

RubyGems

Once you have Ruby installed, I strongly recommend that you get the RubyGems package management system installed, too:

http://www.rubygems.org/

Your Ruby installation may already include RubyGems. Open a command-line terminal and type "gem -h" (without the quotes). If you see the current RubyGems version printed to your screen, then you have RubyGems installed already.

Note that you can install Capistrano independently of RubyGems…but I don't recommend it.

Capistrano

Installing Capistrano via RubyGems is the simplest approach:

gem install -y capistrano

That's all there is to it!