How to use highline menu in Capistrano

published by Edmund Haselwanter on Sunday, September 21, 2008

Sometimes invoking a task in Capistrano requires to input data. A very comfortable approach is to use highline since it is build for this purpose.

    task :ask_for_environment do
      set :environments, [:production,:testing,:development]
      set(:environment, Capistrano::CLI.ui.choose do |menu|

          environments.each do |choice|
            menu.choice choice do set(:environment,choice)
            end
          end
        end

      ) unless exists?(:environment)

      unless environments.include?(environment.to_sym)  
        puts "".rjust(70,'-') << "\nERROR: environment \"#{environment}\" is NOT a valid option\n" << "".rjust(70,'-')
        exit 1
      end

      puts "#{environment}"      
    end    

I think this code is self explanatory (more or less ;-). Capistrano::CLI.ui. returns a highline object we can work with. For more examples on how to use highline visit the highline svn repo This can then be combined with any task you like through the before hook

before "deploy", "ask_for_environment"