vlad

One approach http://www.viget.com/extend/protip-passing-parameters-to-your-rake-tasks/

Stefan recommends a cleaner approach:

http://blog.jayfields.com/2006/10/rake-tasks-with-parameters.html

Background

Where we come from

After journeying from Capistrano to Vlad we eventually use pure Rake tasks for our deployment. While Vlad was a great improvement it also had downsides. Lack of feedback from tasks made it hard to tell why they failed. Also the most interesting feature of those deployment tools is not required in our case: The ability to roll out to many servers at the same time.