My team has several staging servers that run against production data. I'm interested in using pry in a staging environment for better debugging.
Is there a tool for this? pry-remote looks like it might fit, but most people I've seen are using it locally with pow or foreman rather than against a remote server, so I'm not sure that's what its for. There's an unanswered question with this same idea.
If there wasn't a tool for this, I was thinking I might be able to just SSH into the server and run rails server, but I suspect that might interact weirdly with nginx or something, so I'd have to be more careful with this approach.
I had some trouble getting pry-remote working, so I ended up sshing in and starting pry from there. The only things I needed to do were 1) learn to start unicorn (we use a different server when developing locally) 2) prevent timeouts on unicorn + nginx. Thanks to #BillyChan for first recommending this.
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is it possible to deploy a rails project to a remote server using FileZilla ? the server is running nginx/1.4.6 (ubuntu)
if no what is the best way to deploy the project if there is already a running version !
To answer your question yes, the code needs to be up, so FTP should do the trick. You might need to restart nginx to pick up the changes, usually touching a restart.txt is enough, but that's particular to your setup.
Is this the best way? Possibly not!
Others suggested capistrano and that would be a good fit for a server you maintain, or go Heroku (or similar) service for a simpler setup.
Deploying a Rails app is a tough job. There is always the easy way (heroku) however shared servers don't deal well with rails. Theoretically you can but usually this shared servers have really outdated ruby and rails versions and are absolutely useless. And you can try to connect via ssh and try to update it but i doubt you will be able to do that. So... If you are a rails developer i can suggest.
1- For small apps run Heroku (easy and free) however cost grows like hell with the app's growth
2- If you're thinking about developing big apps get a dedicated server (you can get cheap ones for 5€/month) and configure it as u would for your computer except when you run rails you run it in production.
3- Trust me... i fought enough Rails and shared servers and i quit... I just gave up
I must configure my RoR vps hosting for my rails app, but on my localmachine i simple use webrick...
Are any ways to do this on server, so that it will be faster, and also, if it reboot's or memory down, or something that call's shutdown of server, then it automatically starts?
Also how about rails enterprise?
Now i have clean ubuntu server, and rvm on it
Follow this tutorial, it's great for beginner and will answer all your questions: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/06/28/setup-a-ubuntu-vps-for-hosting-ruby-on-rails-applications-2/
Which webserver to use depends on many things. Among others, there's Thin, Unicorn, Rainbows, Puma, and counting.
I suggest you look on google (or even here, I'm pretty this was answered before) for comparisons between ruby webservers, so that you can know what situation each of them are adapted to, and which one will fit your needs best.
For production deployment you need to install nginx or apache,
nginx is lightweight ,consider installing nginx,
Now there are various ways simple and easy to install is passenger with nginx
Or simply you can use nginx+unicorn or nginx+thin you can find various article just google it.
I develop on a Mac, and I'm pretty comfortable setting up an Ubuntu VM with Apache installed, so "you don't need to install Apache" is not really a reason. I run Ruby from the VM anyway, so there doesn't seem to be much difference in system resources needed.
In my head, the advantage of using Apache is that it's going to perform more consistently with my production server.
So what reasons are there to use WEBrick? Does it make development easier somehow?
No there are no advantages. The only "advantage" is that it is the pre-bundled webserver so you at least "have something"
I'm sure most experienced Ruby devs use something else like thin, mongrel, unicorn, pow, passenger, etc...
I'd go for phusion passenger + passsenger pref pane: http://www.fngtps.com/2008/06/putting-the-pane-back-into-deployment
Awesomeness. This way I can act more like the production server and take it easy when adding new projects etc.
I've been using Rails for a school project, and I find the colorized logs helpful when I'm trying to figure out what the server is doing. Sure you could tail -f the apache logs, but color is nice IMO.
My setup: Rails 2.3.10, Ruby 1.8.7 on Windows
The last time I deployed a Rails app from Windows to Linux on Slicehost, I used Capistrano, Nginx, Mongrel, and SVN. That was 3 years ago, fast forward to now, I'm still on Windows for development and is now looking to deploy to EC2. A quick search turns up tools like Rubber and Chef which aren't easy to grasp with a quick read. It seems like Rubber and Chef are designed for multi-EC2 instances deployment which will be useful when I need to scale.
I'm also new to Passenger but it seems to be the default way to deploy Rails app nowadays, one thing that isn't so clear to me is whether Passenger is a replacement for Mongrel? In my old setup, I configured Nginx to forward the Rails requests to a cluster of Mongrel processes but I don't see anything like that for Passenger.
Any insights are much appreciated.
We use something like what you're describing for our production server: EC2 + Apache + Passenger. We haven't had any need to use the fancy deployment tools you describe - plain old Capistrano (plus capistrano-ext so we can use it for multiple environments) does the job just fine. I've looked at Rubber (not Chef), but deemed it needlessly automagical and too poorly documented, and I'm really not sure what it offers that can't be done just as well with roles in Capistrano.
Passenger has been great. It's an "overseer" that manages a collection of Mongrel-like workers (I had thought that the workers were Mongrels, but upon further reading, I don't think they are. The Passenger comparisons page even compares its RPS to a Mongrel cluster, so...), starting them up as needed, culling them under low loads, restarting them if they crash, etc. It's actually very similar to the Server + Mongrel Cluster you described, but probably a bit better, as Passenger has an understanding of the underlying workers that Nginx / Apache don't. And you'll have to make a few minor tweaks to get Capistrano playing nicely with Passenger.
And if possible, pair Passenger with Ruby Enterprise Edition (from the same guys who made Passenger). It's a much faster version of Ruby, mostly due to a rewritten, configurable garbage collector. You'll have to tune your GC settings to get the most out of it.
Hope this helps!
Both might help:
http://ginzametrics.com/deploy-rails-app-to-ec2-with-rubber.html
Hosting rails on ec2
Rubystack allows you to have the same Rails environment for development on Windows and for deployment on Linux. We also have EC2 images (scroll to the bottom) and it is completely free, so you may want to give it a try.
Also, this may not work for you, but depending on your requirements, you may want to go for a PaaS solution like Heroku
Here is my case:
For production I use Heroku.
The question is what should i use for development:
My alternatives are:
Built in Webbrick (or Mongrel)
Passenger with Nginx
The question Im asking myself is:
Why would I use the second alternative when I will upload my application to Heroku anyway. Isnt it better to just use Webbrick/Mongrel instead then for development?
Thanks
I deploy to Heroku a lot and use either Webrick or Thin. No real point in setting up a more complex environment.
The most common use case for Nginx or Apache in development, is when the project makes use of specific features in either server. Since you're deploying on Heroku, there is as far as I know no way of configuring the server setup.
So I can't think of a reason why you should use Nginx while developing.