another option is to install radiant as a submodule; git submodule add git://github.com/radiant/radiant.git vendor/radiant
but beware of the submodules inside the radiant repository itself; cd vendor/radiant; git submodule init; git submodule update I let capistrano take care of nested submodules on the remote; sudo gem install capistrano-deepmodules then add this to your Capfile: require ‘capistrano/deepmodules’