I think this was Capistrano, but you're right I that's quite the throwback as well.

You know... I was a big Capistrano fan back when I worked on Rails webapps and honestly, thinking back to it, it holds up pretty well. I can't really remember a time when I felt like it actually burned me, and that's not something I can say about very many tools. We had Jenkins automatically pushing dev builds all day long (automatically) and had a Jenkins button to deploy to prod. We did have to use the rollback functionality of cap a few times and it always went smoothly.

I learned to do deployments using custom shell scripts, and then someone introduced me to Capistrano. And i didn't get it at all. Why would i use this tool when i could just write a shell script? What does it save me? My main conclusion was that some people just don't like shell scripts as much as me.

Hah, I agree. I think the thing that made me like Capistrano was basically that someone else had written what was basically shell scripts for me and had worked out a bunch of details so that I didn’t have to on my own (eg rollbacks).

Whether cap or custom scripts, the thing I loved about that is… it’s simple enough that you can fully understand what’s happening. Not just at an abstract level but very concretely.