Mina is an interesting alternative for capistrano. It’s really tiny, easy to configure and fast as hell. Overall usage is very well documented, so to avoid repetition I’ll just describe very specific case of deploying rails apps on a shared server through use of a gateway (or whatever you may call it). So it happens I keep my personal project on ones of those shared servers - it’s just cheaper and I don’t have to bother with upgrades, system security etc. - assuming my provider knows what he’s doing of course ;). I can normally log through ssh on my shell account and then from that machine I can ssh to yet another machine that hosts my sites.