Even though I’ve just started learning Ruby on Rails, switchtower was not too hard to get going (fortunately I already had decent amount of subversion and general ruby experience). It’s still pretty rough around the edges, but that’s okay because it’s very customizable, and once you get it going you don’t have to mess with it. I wish there was a troubleshooting section in the manual, and a way to leave feedback, but I’m sure that will come with time.

PERSONAL PITFALLS: Make sure you have proper svn credentials cached on all your deployment servers. It doesn’t seem to work for me when it has to request username/password combos. Also, if you are on Mac OS X and use public key authentication, make sure that your ssh-agent is running. This problem may not affect you, but it had me recompiling ruby and generally banging my head on the wall for a couple hours.