I got tired pretty fast of staring at Passenger’s 500 errors while Capistrano and Rails are busy setting up a new release of a project.

Of course other people got tired as well and came up with numerous fixes. The one I like best is where you first put up a maintenance page, deploy and after all went well, remove the maintenance page. Kind of like how Apple disables the store when they’re adding new stuff, but less flashy I suppose..

It’s pretty easy to do this and I’m just going to provide two links that explain it very well. One for Apache and one for Nginx. They’re both very similar and you can easily pick either of the deploy.rb parts.

That’s about it. It’s very easy to do and probably something a lot of people know already, but definitely something that’ll make you feel more comfortable while deploying.