I recently had the pleasure of deploying a few Rails applications to the FCGI funhouse that is Dreamhost, and just to make matters more interesting, I decided to do the deploys using Capistrano 2.0, rather than its better documented predecessor. After fumbling around a bit trying to translate various Capistrano 1.* recipes, as well as reading a number of postings about some incredibly descriptive FCGI error messages (”FastCGI: incomplete headers (0 bytes) received from server “/home/…./public/dispatch.fcgi”), I finally came upon a couple of postings that, when combined, provided the magic formula:

Getting Started With Capistrano On Dreamhost was an extremely valuable resource. The only deviations I made from this entry were the fact that we already have SVN up, asking Dreamhost whereis ruby, rather than taking the shebang suggestion at face value and running the chmod suggestions contained in the following post: Application Error – Rails application failed to start properly. For whatever reason, FCGi required our tmp and log directories to have 755 permissions.

Thanks very much to those two authors for their helpful posts!!