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….

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.

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!)

The folks over at Code in Motion have documented some minor changes to the standard Capistrano deployment recipe to allow it to work with Solaris’ container hosting.

I haven’t had a chance to use Solaris yet but I was considering taking a look at it to get a better handle on its capabilities. I was aware of Benelix, which is a LiveCD version of OpenSolaris but I see that the OpenSolaris site lists a number of other distributions too.

There are a number of reasons to be interested in Solaris. For starters, there’s a DVD version of Benelix which includes the Glassfish J2EE Application Server (and NetBeans and a few other things).

Why would this interest Ruby on Rails developers? Well, it turns out that RoR apps can now be deployed to a J2EE server such as Glassfish through the magic of JRuby (which is now well advanced).

Incidentally, Ashish Sahni’s blog seems to include a number of other good posts on the topic Ruby/Glassfish integration (in addition to the one just mentioned).

My other interest in looking at Solaris is to discover a bit more about the containers mentioned above.

Rob Thornton over at InfoQ has also commented on this.