Rails Deployment » Rake

Further Dreamhost Deployment Tips

Martin — Mon, 28 May 2007 18:00:34 +0000

Further to my earlier round-up of Dreamhost deployment tips, I see that Jason Harrelson has added his own guide to the mix. Entitled Using Capistrano to overcome deployment hurdles on Dreamhost, it looks like a good overview of the process with plenty of detail on the Dreamost peculiarities as they relate to Rails deployment.

Machinify gem

Martin — Fri, 25 May 2007 12:33:24 +0000

Following on from my discovery of the Ruby on Rails Stacks Google group yesterday, I see that Bradley Taylor of Rails Machine has released Machinify, a rake toolkit to help build Rails stacks.
His first out target is Ubuntu since that is what he uses himself but he plans to get this gem up on Rubyforge and encourage other contributions

Rails Virtual Machines

Martin — Thu, 24 May 2007 21:11:42 +0000

Chris McAvoy tipped me off that deploying your Rails app to some form of virtual machine is the new meme in the Rails deployment world. He also points to DHH’s request to get thinking about what the ideal Rails VM stack would look like. The follow-up discussion is great with contributions from a variety of experienced Rails deployment experts !

Rails deployment goodies mentioned during the discussions include :-

RubyWorks’ open source LAMP stack for Rails
The Rails Machine Capistrano tasks
Capazon Capistrano tasks to manage Amazon EC2 instances
deprec deployment recipes for Capistrano
vmbuilder tools to manage Rails virtual machines using Capistrano
Multi-Tentant Rails applications
HAProxy High Availability proxy (to limit outstanding requests to 1 per mongrel)
monit for starting/stopping mongrel processes

I was particularly interested in Neil Wilson’s comments in this discussion thread where he suggests waking up a frozen Amazon EC2 image just for a particular customer as and when they need it. As he sees it, this ensures that each customer gets a dedicated Rails application for just as long as they need it and scaling the number of users for each machine typically isn’t an issue.

All in all, Ruby on Rails Stacks looks like a discussion group to watch !

Elastic Rails

Martin — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 15:21:56 +0000

Steve Odom has put a nice little webcast online. Entitled 7 Easy Steps to Rails Deployment on EC2, it shows how to use his Elastic Rails plugin to deploy to an Amazon EC2 instance (in case you hadn’t guessed from the title)

Running Rake Tasks from cron

Martin — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 20:58:13 +0000

MediaTemple have added a few new articles to their knowledge-base. The one which caught my eye explains how to run rake tasks from a cron job. I suspect this might be useful for others to know – even if they aren’t hosted at MediaTemple.