Thanks for all the helpful posts. So I've got capistrano deploying my github-hosted application to my staging server. Works great! I'm not using bundler yet as I'm not sure of the benefits there. One of the problems I'm running into is deploying migrations (capistrano complains that it's not able to find /config/database.yml in the current release directory).
I've found a couple of blog posts describing solutions to the issue e.g. http://www.simonecarletti.com/blog/2009/06/capistrano-and-database-yml/ I'm curious why none of your deploy.rb scripts contained any reference to the database config file. How are you guys deploying migrations?