I've just finished setting up my server with phusion passenger and nginx, complete with ruby on rails that are all running swimmingly. Now I can and I have deployed an application with capistrano and I got that working right.
My issue is that I want to host several applications on different domains and deploy them with capistrano on the same server. Is this even possible or am I just hoping for too much? I couldn't seem to find anything on this so any help is appreciated.
If your applications are just standalone applications that don't have dependencies on each other (i.e. you deploy them individually) then just deploy them with capistrano as you normally would.
By default capistrano will deploy to a folder such as /var/www/app_name so as long as all of the apps have a different name configured in their app_name.rb they will be blissfully unaware of each other.
You may need to be a little bit more careful with some of the services you may use, e.g. you may wish to namespace your memcache keys (or run separate memcache instances) so as to avoid clashes between apps.
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We have a team of 2 people writing Rails application. We use DigitalOcean as of VPS and capistrano to deploy it.
But the capistrano deployment scripts are only on one of our two machines.
Is it possible to set up capistrano on the second machine to deploy same project also from it? If yes, how this looks like?
P.S. This might be very easy like adding some SSH keys and running cap production deploy from second machine as the remote VPS has whole infrastructure set up. But we can't take the risk on production system.
There are a couple ways of doing this:
Commit your Cap scripts to the repository alongside your code (this is how I tend to do it; it works well with Ruby on Rails, the config structure matches). Anyone who wants to deploy just needs their SSH key set up on the server.
Create another repository with the deploy scripts; similarly to above, you need SSH keys.
Use a CI server to deploy.
Come up with something else more esoteric. Capistrano is pretty flexible.
Where I work, we generally just add Capistrano to a Rails app's Gemfile, and anyone who checks it out can deploy it to any server to which they have access. Developer SSH keys are added to the servers for this purpose.
Good luck!
I'm new to rails have been searching for deployment guides on the web - it's quite fragmented. I see some which recommend deploying as a sudo enabled user. I was thinking you would create a user with no sudo powers to run the app for security reasons. It would need it's own home directory for RVM and bundler but having sudo powers seems redundant and a security risk. I'm doing this all manually as it's a tricky beta level application and deploying it is not yet straightforward, so capistrano would only be a layer of obfuscation at this point.
I'm using thin as the server with Nginx as the proxy and redis and Postgres as the database. Clockwork and sidekiq as well.
Capistrano seems like a lot of work even for a small project but it's worth getting setup anyway if you have hopes of the application growing (and thus the complexity of deployment increasing).
I personally like the idea of separating the distribution specific Ruby available (and gems) to an RVM deployment specific to the application. Furthermore, requiring bundler to manage gem dependencies and ensuring compliance is invaluable. I wouldn't suggest enabling sudo for that user; it'll expose the whole stack from HTTP requests to root level OS control. Applications shouldn't require administrative access, deployment scripts might.
If you're new to Rails I'd recommend something simple for your first deployment. Heroku allows you to deploy apps by simply doing a git push to their repository. They handle all the steps necessary to make your app available on the Internet. Best of all it's free as long as you don't need heavy resources.
EngineYard is another hosting solution that's easy to deploy to and step up from Heroku in terms of flexibility (and cost).
Once you're comfortable with deploying production apps then you can look to using your own servers and using capistrano for the ultimate in customization.
I have production websites running in both environments and I've yet to need to go to the trouble of migrating to my own hosted server.
I'm still getting used to the Rails development ecosystem. Recently I learned how to use capistrano for deploying to my servers using apache and passenger, and I love how I can put a rather complex set of deployment instructions into my deploy.rb so that they are executed with a single "cap deploy" call, with an automatic rollback if anything goes wrong.
Now I'm looking into deploying my project on Heroku, and I expected to be able to use capistrano for my deployments there. But I've been unable to find any documentation on how to do this. Is it possible? Are there capistrano tasks that let me automate deployments on Heroku?
Does this even make sense? After all capistrano works in a specific way (ssh into the server) and assumes a specific directory structure (public/releases/shared etc). Both of these are not possible with Heroku as far as I know. But still I would like to have the convenience of capistrano. I know I can put the steps necessary for my deployment (git push/migrate/restart resque workers...) into a single rake task, and I would have the convenience of deploying with a call to a single command; but I would not have the benefit of capistrano transactions and rollbacks, which are very important in my mind.
I'm probably missing something very basic about how these technologies fit together. It surprises me a bit I haven't been able to find any discussion on this subject anywhere. Can anyone share their experiences?
Heroku uses Git for deployment, and is not capistrano friendly. In fact, the philosophy itself is different - Heroku does not have 'servers' where you can SSH to, or customize server to your need.
Heroku uses Dynos, which are predefined instances, with specific deployment architecture which covers majority of Rails deployment needs. You can do actions like Rollbacks, backups, migrations etc with Heroku, in some cases, more sophisticated than normal capistrano scripts.
Unless your setup is quite different, you can safely use Heroku for Rails (with only Git, of course) . If not, AWS is better bet.
What are the useful gems or softwares that will help deployment of RoR 3.2 application on the clouds?
There is no specific requirements since I just want to get experience with it. But I am thinking of Amazon EC2 as a primary environment to test the application. The goal is to deploy it in the multiple servers.
I guess the most naive way would be launching the same application on multiple servers at the same time, but that will requires a lot of manual restart/reboot which requires a lot of human resources.
Is a single application of ruby on rails just not suited well for deployment on multiple servers?
We use Capistrano (https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano) to communicate with multiple EC2 instances on AWS.
We use Chef (https://github.com/opscode/chef) to do the system management configuration.
You can get cookbooks for various applications that you want to install (eg nginx, monit, logrotate...) from Opscode (http://community.opscode.com/cookbooks)
You will need both Capistrano and Chef to setup and deploy to AWS.
Puppet is another system management configuration that you can use too. (https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet)
This is what Capistrano is for.
https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano/wiki/
I admit that I don't follow much of anything "right" on deploying test versus production code. I have been using ASP.NET, and I typically run it locally in Visual Studio, it works, I upload it, I test it again on the production server.
I have read several people say that deploying Rails apps is harder and there are special programs/ways on the ruby site about deploying RoR. I've only toyed with RoR. What is special about deployment? You don't just copy and paste the code and run it (from development machine to the production)? Is it because one is in Apache and the other running on the built in server?
This will be on a Mac Server if it matters.
Deploying RoR is not difficult anymore, especially with Phusion Passenger.
What is somewhat difficult, is getting a automated production environment setup with capistrano, vlad, etc. If you don't mind simply copying your code to the server, you can do that just fine. Most people choose not to do it that way because you lose out on a lot of the benefits that the automated deployment tools give you.
I guess people consider a Rails app harder to deploy than say some PHP apps or such where you just plop the code somewhere and point Apache or whatever at it. But, as mentioned above, you could do that now with Phusion Passenger.
We use Nginx+Passenger, but not for simplicity of deployment. Capistrano is our deploy tool of choice, and really, unless you have a very simple app, you're going to want something like Capistrano anyway. For example, with our deploy, we do a slew of things:
run any database migrations
generate release notes automatically, based on all the commits to Git between the last deploy and this one
notify various people via email (with differing lists depending on whether the deploy is to our staging environment or production) - we do this via cap_gun which integrates with Capistrano.
Notify New Relic RPM of the deploy so it can mark it in our RPM analysis
Notify Hoptoad of the deploy, so it too can have that data when reporting any exceptions
produce our sitemap.xml file, and ping Google to tell them there's a new one
update crontab files (I store our crontab files for each server in our git repo, and then on deploy it sees if there is a new version and updates accordingly, etc.).
flush/restart memcached
There are other ways aside from Capistrano, but it's a proven tool, with a lot of flexibility, yet pretty simple to setup a vanilla configuration.
So, my take is that once you get into any app that is beyond just the very simplest of apps, you're going to need/want to be doing things other than just simply updating the code. In the beginning though, if you just need the code updates, and maybe Rails migrations, then you can do simpler things like Passenger and code sync, or look at tools like Heroku or Engine Yard's stuff where they do a deploy by doing a Git clone (and then offer some additional abilities).
Another super easy way to deploy is with http://heroku.com/
Some of the issues you face with deploying rails to production:
Database connection.
You need to be sure that the database connector is set up for the production environment.
Database migrations.
You have to run database migrations against the production database even though you may have already run them in production/testing/staging
Ruby version. The version or sub-version or Ruby can trip you up, e.g. An error occurred while installing debugger-linecache (1.1.1), and Bundler cannot continue
Gem dependency.
Your production environment may have different packages and gems from development. Bundler will figure this out for the most part and install the dependencies but occasionally there are still issues that you have to resolve manually.
Dependencies.
Some gems on some machine have particular dependencies. I have seen frequent problems with using gems on my unix box that work on OSX and vice-versa.
Note the last 3 shouldn't affect you if on the same machine but I included them based on the title and to be comprehensive.
It's not especially hard. If you stick to conventions then with a little bit of configuration it boils down to this:
cap deploy
...however there is sometimes a bit of effort needed up front to get the workflow in place.
The good news is that lots of people have packaged up solutions and stacks for RoR that you can just plug and play. For example, google ec2onrails - this is a packaged Ubuntu image and set of capistrano tasks for running rails apps in Amazon's EC2 cloud, with lots of common stuff set up already out of the box.
Choose a good hosting provider and you should be able to find something similar for that also.
An easy way to deploy Rails apps is to use Phusion Passenger. Deployment doesn't get much easier than that for any programming language or framework. You can do that on a Mac server.
Another really easy way to deploy rails is with jruby and the glassfish gem.