If you just follow the quickstart as listed, when you get to executing:
cap:deploy
you will see at the end of everything something like the following:
- executing `deploy:restart'
- executing "sudo -p 'sudo password: ' -u app /var/www/apps/devalot/current/script/process/reaper"
servers: 208.78.103.116?
[208.78.103.116] executing command
*** [err :: 208.78.103.116] sudo: no passwd entry for app!
command finished
command "sudo -p 'sudo password: ' -u app /var/www/apps/devalot/current/script/process/reaper" failed on 208.78.103.116
At first I figured that this was a big problem, but it turns out to be the default assumption of capistrano that you are running on a shared host, so restart is called which does a reaper task. Since the quickstart is for slicehost, something should be added in the instructions either on how to remove that action in your deploy.rb, or at least a warning to ignore the error.