At work we’ve been rolling out PHP-FPM to more and more of our clients’ servers, which has been great for performance and keeping server loads down. The only issue we’ve had (beyond some initial configuration) was related to our deployments: many of our projects, especially our web applications, are deployed through Capistrano, a Ruby-based task runner that’s extremely popular among the Ruby on Rails crowd. While Capistrano let’s us reduce deployments to running cap production deploy, PHP-FPM typically needs to be restarted before it will start using the new code.

Having to manually SSH into a server to restart PHP-FPM after a deployment takes some of the sexy out of one-line deployments, so we sought to find a better way. The goal: be able to restart PHP-FPM (sudo service php5-fpm restart) from within a Capistrano task without being prompted for passwords (we use Public-Key authentication) or having to manually SSH in to restart the server.

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