capistrano upload! thinks ~ referenced local directory is on remote server - deployment

Question

So every example I've looked up indicates this is how one is supposed to do it but I think I may have found a bug unless there's another way to do this.
I'm using upload! to upload assets to a remote list of servers. The task looks like this:
desc "Upload grunt compiled css/js."
task :upload_assets do
on roles(:all) do
%w{/htdocs/css /htdocs/js}.each do |asset|
upload! "#{fetch(:local_path) + asset}", "#{release_path.to_s + '/' + asset}", recursive: true
end
end
end
If local_path is defined as an absolute path such as:
set :local_path:, '/home/dcmbrown/projects/ABC'
This works fine. However if I do the following:
set :local_path:, '~/projects/ABC'
I end up getting the error:
The deploy has failed with an error: Exception while executing on ec2-54-23-88-125.us-west-2.compute.amazon.com: No such file or directory - ~/projects/ABC/htdocs/css
It's not a ' vs " issue as I've tried both (and I didn't think capistrano paid attention to that anyway).
Is this a bug? Is there a work around? Am I just doing it wrong?

Answer 1

I ended up discovering the best way to do this is to actually use path expansion! (headsmack)
irb> File.expand_path('~dcmbrown/projects/ABC')
=> "/home/dcmbrown/projects/ABC"
Of course what I'd like is to do automatic path expansion but you can't have everything. I think I was mostly dumbstruck that it didn't automatically; so much so I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out why it didn't work and ended up wasting time asking here. :(

Answer 2

I don't think the error is coming from the remote server, it just looks like it since it's running that upload command in the context of a deploy.
I just created a single cap task to just do an upload using the "~" character and it also fails with
cap aborted!
SSHKit::Runner::ExecuteError: Exception while executing as deploy#XXX: No such file or directory # rb_file_s_stat - ~/Projects/testapp/public/404.html
It appears to be a Ruby issue not Capistrano as this also fails in a Ruby console
~/Projects/testapp $ irb
2.2.2 :003 > File.stat('~/Projects/testapp/public/404.html')
Errno::ENOENT: No such file or directory # rb_file_s_stat - ~/Projects/testapp/public/404.html
from (irb):3:in `stat'
from (irb):3
from /Users/supairish/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.2.2/bin/irb:11:in `<main>'