Deploying branches with Capistrano

This morning I had occasion to deploy a branch of a git repository to a staging server but hadn’t the foggiest idea how. A quick search through the capistrano source code revealed that I could use set :branch "branch_name" in my deploy script. I tried it and it worked. I then figured I would need to make a similar change across all my branches. Of course, I’m a lazy sod and wondered if there wasn’t a better way.

If you’re not familiar with git, the output of the git branch command is a list of branches with an asterisk marking the one currently checked out on your local machine. For example:

> git branch
* drupal_authentication
fragment_caching
master

So, I figured, what if I just parsed the output and searched for the branch marked as current:

set :branch, $1 if `git branch` =~ /\* (\S+)\s/m

Now I’m able to deploy whatever branch is current on my local machine from a single, shared, deploy script.