RoR deployment and maintenance

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,   I have a developed and working RoR prototype. So far its been mostly in development mode environment and under script/server on windows .I want to move it to a hosting server and continue development.

Whats the best option? - How good is Ubuntu 7? I tried that first as I have experience on that.I have been able to configure and get my app running but looking for tips on maintaining the setup and continuing development.

Also what are the best practices for deployment..I just find myself doing development on my box and manually ftp-ing the changed files.Ideally I want to set up some kind of script / source control where if i can check in stuff to my hosting server (except for config details ) after changes are done and I am done testing..

Is there some source that can help me out

vk.

2

Ubuntu is fine, but the most important for you is to choose a distro
you are comfortable with.

An example of good pratices is to use capistrano for deployment: http://www.capify.org/ You can use apache and mod_passenger: http://www.modrails.com/ to run
you apps on your server

3

Aurélien Bottazini wrote:

Ubuntu is fine, but the most important for you is to choose a distro you are comfortable with.

An example of good pratices is to use capistrano for deployment: http://www.capify.org/ You can use apache and mod_passenger: http://www.modrails.com/ to run you apps on your server

An even better practice is to kick capistrano out, use a good scm such as Mercurial, and roll your own deployment script.

I'll have to give mod_rails a try one day, but I am still sure that Nginx+Thin is the best setup.

4

[...]

An even better practice is to kick capistrano out, use a good scm such as Mercurial, and roll your own deployment script.

Why is that an "even better practice"? I find Capistrano extremely useful, even with Git (surely a "good scm"). I have indeed rolled my own deployment script -- in Capistrano. I don't see that a source- control system has anything directly to do with deployment (unless you want to get clever with commit hooks the way Heroku has, but while that works for Heroku, I'm not convinced that that's a particularly good idea in the general case).

I'll have to give mod_rails a try one day, but I am still sure that Nginx+Thin is the best setup.

How can you be "sure" than Nginx + Thin is better than mod_rails if you haven't even tried mod_rails? Unlike any other Rails deployment option that I'm aware of, mod_rails makes deploying Rails apps as easy as deploying PHP apps, and performance appears to be excellent. What makes Nginx and Thin so excellent?

Best,

5

If you have a relatively simple site, you can use rsync with exluded files/directories for production deployment from your build environment.

We use Ubuntu 8.04 and run RoR with nginx and thin. They work quite well.

Thin has smaller footprint. We used to run mongrel_cluster with apache2, that works too.

cheers,

rp8 Krishna wrote:

6

If you have a relatively simple site, you can use rsync with exluded files/directories for production deployment from your build environment.

Yes, but you might as well automate that into a Capistrano script.

We use Ubuntu 8.04 and run RoR with nginx and thin. They work quite well.

Thin has smaller footprint.

Good to know. I've never tried Thin.

We used to run mongrel_cluster with apache2, that works too.

Sure. Passenger basically automates this.

cheers,

rp8

Best,