Simply put, no, you don’t need to , but it’s good for best practices and keeping your gemset unpolluted. The best way to do this is open to discussion, but basically as long as Capistrano is available to you in the environment in which you work, it does not matter which groups it is or are not related, although I can see little benefit from using an arbitrary group :tools, since :developmentfirst of all, exclude it in production and "automatically-magically."