Deploy when github goes down
As git is distributed, the repository on your local machine is good enough to deploy from.
First start a git server on your local machine.
git daemon --base-path=/projects/rails_apps/ --export-all
Then change your capistrano recipe to deploy with the copy command and change the repo to point to your local machine.
set :deploy_via, :copy
set :repository 'git://127.0.0.1/proj_name'
Where in this example the code resides at /projects/rails_apps/proj_name
Now capistrano will deploy from your local repository, thus avoiding the currently melted github
There are other options which have been listed by chris wanstrath in the following article