How to Configure Capistrano to Deploy from Local Git Repository?

What changes do I need to make to the deploy.rb file below to make it deploy my app from a local git repo? If I can't deploy from a local repo, can I have capistrano use the working copying instead?

set :application, "my_app"
set :repository, "."
set :local_repository, "file:///path/to/application/.git"
set :deploy_to, "/data/www/apps/#{application}"
set :deploy_via, :copy
set :copy_cache, true
set :user, "dane"
set :use_sudo, false

set :scm, :git # Should I change this to :none
set :branch, "master"

That's easy:

set :scm, :none
set :repository, "."
set :deploy_via, :copy

Simply run Capistrano from the root of your project.

The deploy_via, :copy has been dropped in version 3.

https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano/issues/695

In most cases you should have your code in a online repository like github or bitbucket, and then you just have to set this line in your deploy.rb file:

set :repo_url, '[email protected]:my_account/my_project.git'

Though if you happen to have a repository on the remote server that you are deploying too, then you would change that line in your deploy.rb file to be this:

set :repo_url, 'file:///home/deploy/bare_repo/my_project.git'

Keep in mind that the three forward slashes are important since the file:// tells capistrano that you are looking for a file, and the preceding slash is needed to point to a root path which would be something like /home/deploy/bare_repo/my_project.git.

set :repository, 'file:///path/to/your/git_repository'
set :local_repository, "file://."
set :scm, :git
# set :deploy_via, :copy # you must comment it

Capistrano 3 solution which is running for me:

  before :deploy, :deploy_from_local_repo
  
  task :deploy_from_local_repo do
    set :repo_url,  "file:///tmp/.git"
    run_locally do
      execute "tar -zcvf /tmp/repo.tgz .git"
    end
    on roles(:all) do
      upload! '/tmp/repo.tgz', '/tmp/repo.tgz'
      execute 'tar -zxvf /tmp/repo.tgz -C /tmp'
    end
  end

Before deploying you are uploading a tar.gz file to the server, unzip and finally reset the :repo_url to file mode.

Take care to remove the pervious repo:

task :remove_repo do
  on roles(:all) do
    execute "rm -r #{repo_path}"
  end
end

I used a combination of @Ariejan and @HungYuHei answers which worked for me.

set :deploy_via, :copy
set :use_sudo, false    
set :scm, "git"
set :repository, "."
set :local_repository, "."
set :branch, "master"

If you use local copy (and don't have the project on Github), then it is also wise to disable :check_revision task in your deploy.rb which checks whether remote is in sync with local git.

normally deploy via copy is super slow. but copy_cache only available if scm is NOT none (sync uses scm) this means that deploy from working copy can only be done with sluggish copy. I managed to find a fast setup for copy deploy from local repo that is fast. You still need to locally commit changes though but do not need to push them.

set :scm, "git"
set :local_repository, "file://."
set :deploy_via, :copy
# cache only seems to work if use scm
set :copy_cache, true
set :copy_via, :scp
set :copy_exclude, [".zeus*", ".bundle", ".git", "tmp/*", "doc", "log/*", "fixtures/*"]

Unfortunately it sometimes breaks mysteriously with:

fatal: Could not parse object 'c438b9d1242cb311be43d681e3f89bc486d748ed'.`

Ideally syncing local cache should be implemented even if no scm is used for deploy from working copy to work. great feature to add to capistrano