The project is a sample for using roundsman: Roundsman is a clever little tool that combines capistrano&chef to give you a push-button-solution to provision an empty machine with a customized software-stack and configure you rails(or whatever)-application for deployment.
The example here uses this approach to deploy and configure a machine to run redmine, the open-source projectmanagement-software.
It contains examples to configure either an amazon-machine (see config/deploy/amazon.rb, or a local vagrant-machine.
You can read more about this approach in the blog-article on Deploying Redmine.
This came out of a project that we ran in the Summer of 2012 for Alere in collaboration with Method Park: Many thanks for their input and for agreeing to make this work public.
The project currently uses a patched version of roundsman, as I ran into some dependency-issues with the chef-version that roundsman is using.
Found an issue? Have a great idea? Want to help? Great! Create an issue for it, ask, or even better; fork the project and fix the problem yourself. Pull requests are always welcome. :)