There’s already a PR fixing this: #127 The bug got introduced in https://github.com/middleman-contrib/middleman-deploy/commit/86f76b2a53b408487eb294c5462c31be0751232a#diff-6d0c130d155d957759feb2f03e0d7f1b: `self` is necessary here, because the local variable `user` is shadowing the attribute accessor.