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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Deployment
  4. Server Configuration And Automation
  5. Capistrano vs Gradle

Capistrano vs Gradle

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Capistrano
Capistrano
Stacks1.5K
Followers647
Votes232
GitHub Stars12.9K
Forks1.8K
Gradle
Gradle
Stacks24.3K
Followers9.8K
Votes254
GitHub Stars18.1K
Forks5.0K

Capistrano vs Gradle: What are the differences?

What is Capistrano? A remote server automation and deployment tool written in Ruby. Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

What is Gradle? A powerful build system for the JVM. Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites.

Capistrano belongs to "Server Configuration and Automation" category of the tech stack, while Gradle can be primarily classified under "Java Build Tools".

Some of the features offered by Capistrano are:

  • Reliably deploy web application to any number of machines simultaneously, in sequence or as a rolling set
  • Automate audits of any number of machines (checking login logs, enumerating uptimes, and/or applying security patches)
  • Script arbitrary workflows over SSH

On the other hand, Gradle provides the following key features:

  • Declarative builds and build-by-convention
  • Language for dependency based programming
  • Structure your build

"Automated deployment with several custom recipes" is the top reason why over 122 developers like Capistrano, while over 106 developers mention "Flexibility" as the leading cause for choosing Gradle.

Capistrano and Gradle are both open source tools. Capistrano with 11.1K GitHub stars and 1.71K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Gradle with 9.23K GitHub stars and 2.7K GitHub forks.

Netflix, Lyft, and 9GAG are some of the popular companies that use Gradle, whereas Capistrano is used by Typeform, 500px, and New Relic. Gradle has a broader approval, being mentioned in 465 company stacks & 360 developers stacks; compared to Capistrano, which is listed in 293 company stacks and 81 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

Capistrano
Capistrano
Gradle
Gradle

Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites.

Reliably deploy web application to any number of machines simultaneously, in sequence or as a rolling set;Automate audits of any number of machines (checking login logs, enumerating uptimes, and/or applying security patches);Script arbitrary workflows over SSH;Automate common tasks in software teams;Drive infrastructure provisioning tools such as chef-solo, Ansible or similar
Declarative builds and build-by-convention;Language for dependency based programming;Structure your build;Deep API;Gradle scales;Multi-project builds;Many ways to manage your dependencies;Gradle is the first build integration tool
Statistics
GitHub Stars
12.9K
GitHub Stars
18.1K
GitHub Forks
1.8K
GitHub Forks
5.0K
Stacks
1.5K
Stacks
24.3K
Followers
647
Followers
9.8K
Votes
232
Votes
254
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 121
    Automated deployment with several custom recipes
  • 63
    Simple
  • 23
    Ruby
  • 11
    Release-folders with symlinks
  • 9
    Multistage deployment
Pros
  • 110
    Flexibility
  • 51
    Easy to use
  • 47
    Groovy dsl
  • 22
    Slow build time
  • 10
    Crazy memory leaks
Cons
  • 8
    Inactionnable documentation
  • 6
    It is just the mess of Ant++
  • 4
    Hard to decide: ten or more ways to achieve one goal
  • 2
    Bad Eclipse tooling
  • 2
    Dependency on groovy

What are some alternatives to Capistrano, Gradle?

Ansible

Ansible

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

Apache Maven

Apache Maven

Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.

Chef

Chef

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.

Terraform

Terraform

With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.

Puppet Labs

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Salt

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

Bazel

Bazel

Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment.

Fabric

Fabric

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

AWS OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks

Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component

Pants

Pants

Pants is a build system for Java, Scala and Python. It works particularly well for a source code repository that contains many distinct projects.

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