It's usually a lot of extra work to make deployment on new systems completely automated, so developers don't bother.
Deprec + Capistrano makes this very close to a reality for Rails. It has some niggles -- like installing virtually everything from tarballs when I would strongly prefer it apt-get everything so that I could get updates and so paths and configuration files jelled well with what Ubuntu expects -- but it has been, and continues, to be a lifesaver for me in getting new projects up to speed.
You can also do one step deploys and automate a lot of cruftiness. (I can do upwards of forty deploys to my staging server in a day when in development mode on Twilio integration -- which is hard to test without actually having an accessible HTTP server and making phones actually ring -- so I have a script which commits my changes, tags a new staging release, and pushes it to the staging server in one command.)
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It's usually a lot of extra work to make deployment on new systems completely automated, so developers don't bother.
Deprec + Capistrano makes this very close to a reality for Rails. It has some niggles -- like installing virtually everything from tarballs when I would strongly prefer it apt-get everything so that I could get updates and so paths and configuration files jelled well with what Ubuntu expects -- but it has been, and continues, to be a lifesaver for me in getting new projects up to speed.
You can also do one step deploys and automate a lot of cruftiness. (I can do upwards of forty deploys to my staging server in a day when in development mode on Twilio integration -- which is hard to test without actually having an accessible HTTP server and making phones actually ring -- so I have a script which commits my changes, tags a new staging release, and pushes it to the staging server in one command.)