Rails Deployment

Andrew Landry seems to be a fan of Heroku, the web application which lets you create a Rails app entirely from your web browser – although, as Andrew points out, you can still work from a locally-hosted clone if you want to.

I see their blog also has details of how to hook your Heroku Rails app up to HopToad’s web-based exception tracker which is getting a lot of traction itself at the moment.

Has anyone else tried Heroku and, if so, what did you think of it?

Charles Nutter has a posted a detailed runthrough of how to deploy your Ruby application using JRuby on a J2EE App Server.

He is concerned that the mention of appservers might be putting some people off but explains that they are now much easier to set up than they were a few years ago and they might even make your life easier ! He uses Warbler to deploy to a Glassfish v2 server and explains how to set up Glassfish first. Worth a read, I’d say….

This is slightly old news for some (30 days old to be exact) but I see that Nick Sieger has posted his RailsConf slides on deploying using JRuby. The other mod_rails : Easy Rails Deployment with JRuby gives an overview of what you need to do to convert your existing Rails app to run under JRuby as well as an introduction to Warbler which is a gem which lets you package your Rails application as a WAR file ready for deployment to a Java app server like Glassfish or JBoss.

Nick also has an article on JRuby-Rack with lets you run your Rack-enabled application on a Java application server.

I’ve started playing with Sinatra and just noticed that cschneid over at Gittr has some interesting Sinatra-related posts lately.

Of particular interest to readers of this this blog I suspect would be the one which talks (in nice, easy-to-understand terms) about how to deploy Rack-based applications to Dreamhost using their new Passenger support.

PoolParty is a tool which, according to their web site, helps you deploy, monitor and load-balance Amazon EC2 instances.

The RailsConf ’08 presentation on PoolParty is available on Scribd for those looking to take the plunge (sorry, couldn’t resist !)

Here’s another interesting presentation featuring Amazon EC2. Entitled Rails on AWS and authored by Jonathan Weiss of Wissensmanagement GmbH, it looks like it was presented at RubyFools 2008 in Copenhagen.

Here’s another new deployment option which might interest those of you deploying to Amazon’s EC2 service. Rubber lets you deploy to one or more machines in the cloud and add more as you need them (with a role-based model similar to Capistrano’s).

They have a quickstart if you want to get a feel for how you’d use it before picking it up.

I came across a novel deployment option this week. Fuzed lets you run your Rails application behind YAWS, a high-performance Erlang web server. At least that’s what I think it does. The description over at Github is slightly different in that it doesn’t specifically mention YAWS but it may still be in there.

Scott Chacon has a good video over at Join the Conversation showing Fuzed in action in conjunction with Amazon EC2 – well worth a watch. The scripts he uses in the video are up on github.

If you are deploying your Rails application to shared hosting solution or a VPS you probably want to be frugal with the amount of resources you are using (indeed this is often the case with other deployment options as well).

One way to reduce the footprint of your application might be to take a look at Phusion’s new Ruby Enterprise Edition. They claim it uses 33% less memory (on average) than vanilla Ruby when used with their recently released mod_rails / Phusion Passenger Apache module.

I hadn’t looked at it yet since the inclusion of “Enterprise” in the name made me assume that this was a (costly) commercial offering – not that working for commercial gain is a bad thing !

However, it turns out the name is misleading since it is, in fact, an open source implementation of the Ruby language with an enhanced garbage collector and improved memory allocator (amongst other features).

Oh, and it can run alongside your existing copy of Ruby if you want to give it a whirl…

Capistrano 2.4 was released on June 13th. Jamis Buck lists the latest enhancements. Installation should be a simple

gem install capistrano (maybe preceded with sudo on your platform!)