allskonar

Here is an excellent case of a big problem … with a incredible simple solution. I upgraded my slicehost ubunto vpn from dapper to hardy. A risky business with nothing real in jeopardy except for the pride of a 380 days up time on the server. I shut down everything running on the server and upgrade to hardy. All is fine except that I realize that when I am starting all the services that small things tab completion doesn’t work among other annoyances and doing work on a server without that is practically unbearable. So I figured I would make some time to fix it… the best place to go on these issues is slicehost … THE ROCK. Tony on the slicehost campfire chat immediately identified the problem and it was fixed within 5 minutes.

*Tony | try just running “bash”

And as he said that I was like shit and ran echo $SHELL only to realize that I was in “sh” but now everything is fixed and dandy and I have my tab completion back along with other normal bashy things … thank god. Did I mention that slicehost rocks!

Now that everyone who is doing web development is supposed to be having so much fun! All the latest technologies are all about removing the pain and putting in the fun … but wait! How about making deploying all of this stuff fun too? It’s easy to throw up Ruby on Rails and run it on your local machine on the good old http://localhost:3000. But what about deploying it to your just recently purchased vowel free godaddy domain which sounds so 2.0?

When I initially started researching how to deploy Ruby on Rails application I got scared shit-less fast-cgi, mongrel, apache mod_proxy and god knows what. I spent a good part of a Saturday trying to install and set this up on a virtual host that I had at the time but soon gave up and started googling for easier answers, even considered for a brief moment paying ridiculous amounts for someone to do it for me. And like with so many things I was not the only one who had gone through this and there are always smart people out there that help the rest of us to achieve the seemingly impossible. Here is a list things and places to consider if you are in, or want to be in the process of deploying Ruby on Rails application.

1. Slicehost.com these guys are amazing, they are small they don’t seem to sleep! their wiki is stuffed with useful stuff. I run my virtual server with them $20 a month but also have a dreamhost account for things that I don’t know how to manage myself such as mail clients etc. Slicehost.com is not for absolute beginners but one can learn allot by buying a slice and learning as you go! And they and their community is amazingly helpful and friendly.
2. Capistrano which is a system for automating deployment tasks for Ruby on Rails. This is absolutely brilliant technology and really makes deploying code fun. To put it short you develop at home write db migrations and pretty much change everything you can think of. When time comes to deploy the code on a production server you can transfer all of that good work in one swoop with out a hassle.
3. Deprec. Now getting to the point where Capistrano is going to be your friend is tricky, you need to install the server stack you need to know all about mongrels and apache front-serving and all of that scary stuff. BUT you don’t really because deprec is a gem that extends Capistrano and helps you with installing the server stack if you run a Ubuntu server. You can have a running production server in under an hour! Amazing stuff. Check out slicehosts wiki page.