Capistrano: Calling tasks from other tasks

I wrote a new capistrano task for deploying a rails app the other day that would totally reset the old deployed database and give me a fresh new one with fixtures pre-loaded. This is useful for deploying different branches to the same location on a server. However the lack of proper capistrano documentation let to some wasted time figuring out how to invoke previously defined tasks from a new task. Most of them are just simple methods you can call, but to call the task deploy:migrations is a little more complex because it’s really a task called migrations in the deploy namespace.

So for my new “super deploy” task, deploy.rb looks something like this:

task :drop_db
  run "cd #{deploy_to}; rake db:drop"
end

task :create_db
  run "cd #{deploy_to}; rake db:drop"
end

task :super_deploy
  drop_db
  namespace :deploy
      migrations
  end
  create_db
end

Pretty simple but I got hung up it for a few minutes. So there you go.