The framework is configured to recognize development, test and production environments out of the box. As such, migrations can be issued against any environment, whether its a local or remote server (assuming the network / remote server is configured to allow for connections from your current location).

Because migrations represent incremental changes, they are a great for deployment of your application. With just a single command line parameter, the migrations can be altered from running against the default development database to production instead.

By default a call to

    php main.php db:migrate

will run against the development database specified in config/database.inc.php.

The ENV command line parameter can be used to specify a different database to run against, as specific in the configuration file.

For example, to run against the production database (as specified in config/database.inc.php):

    php main.php db:migrate ENV=production

You can add more deployment environments to the configuration file by following the existing syntax and then the ENV variable will automatically use it.

To hook into the Capistrano "deploy:migrations" point, put this in your recipe:

   desc "Run Ruckusing Migrations"
   task :migrations, :role => :db do
     run "cd #{latest_release}/path/to/ruckusing && php main.php db:migrate ENV=#{stage}"
   end

The above assumes you're using the "staging" Capistrano facility so that the stage variable contains one of "development", "staging" or "production", etc.