I've completed my website using a Ruby on Rails framework, which uses a simple database.
I have set up an Amazon S3 account and would like to upload it to this, however I've been told that I would need more than just this to get the website working.
I am COMPLETELY new to uploading RoR websites, so would anyone be willing to talk me through what needs doing/ why?
Amazon S3 is simply for storing static assets, images, css etc. You can run entirely static sites on it ie html but not 'applications'.
You may have misheard - you could use Amazon EC2 which provide you with a virtual server to host your application and run your application.
If you are entirely new to this process then I suggest you investigate the likes of Heroku (heroku.com) EngineYard, BrightBox, Rackspace etc With the first you probably would be able to use their free offering and deployment is simply by Git - there's no system administration involved.
Related
So I host with company X and have my domain on there. I deployed my app to heroku and pointed my domain at it. I can't wrap my head around if I am hosting my site on heroku now or if I am hosting it on company X's servers.
I would assume I'm hosting on herokus server because that is the most logical, but just keep having this brainfart.
Could someone please explain this to me?
Your application is on Heroku's server. All company X has done is perform the DNS magic necessary to map the friendly URL (www.yoursite.com) to your Heroku deployment.
Amazon
You should also be aware that Heroku doesn't actually "store" the app on its own servers - it uses Amazon's ec2 cloud to create instances of your app
So although you have your domain with company X, your app handled through heroku, it will actually be running in one of Amazon's data centers
Keep that in mind when you start to grow (you may find benefits of using Amazon directly)
I have a Rails app on Heroku that seems to be having trouble scaling the way I want it to. In the app, a user can upload multiple nested images to an invoice. Based on my research, it seems that this ties up a Heroku web dyno (I'm running 3) until it's done uploading. I've looked into Carrierwave Direct so that a web dyno isn't used but it doesn't seem that this is compatible with a nested model. Does anyone have any other suggestions?
Don't upload images to Heroku. It will lock your entire web server. Instead, use a jQuery library (https://github.com/blueimp/jQuery-File-Upload) to upload directly to Amazon S3 from the client side.
I'm new to Amazon's cloud though I have used other cloud provides like Rackspace, Windows Azure and Heroku. I want to deploy my Ruby on Rails 4 application on Amazon but I am overwhelmed with all of the services Amazon offers. AWS, EC2, EBS, S3, SimpleDB, Elastic Beanstalk.... argh!!
My site is a relatively simple Rails app with a Postres database. There will not be much traffic at launch but we obviously hope it will grow and need to scale up.
What is a simple, no-frills plan that Amazon offers to get my app out there? I feel like I need to read 100 pages of documentation just to understand what it is that Amazon is offering.
First of all, there are no plans. You sign-up for an AWS account, and you have access to whichever services you want to use.
Secondly, I can wholeheartedly recommend a single-instance Elastic Beanstalk environment to get started. It only uses 1 EC2 virtual server behind the scenes, but you get much better deployment options.
I can't speak to other services like Heroku.
I'm making a small photo-gallery app. The photos will be hosted locally. Right now I use dreamhost but their rails implementation looks horrible. So I'm looking for other options. I know Heroku gives you one 'web dyno' for free, but they don't say anything about how much space you get. As I said, I want my photos stored locally with the app, I don't want to deal with s3 or other cloud storage.
there is no local storage with heroku - only temporary space. you'll need to use S3 or some off-site storage with heroku.
(and I agree, rails on DH is awful, even if you enable passenger)
Use Openshift to deploy your app
checkout this deploying rails app in openshift
openshift provides one permanent data directory to store data and its free
If you are interested in VPS, Digital Ocean - https://www.digitalocean.com/, provides excellent hosting starting from $5. And you can store your photos on the local disc.
There are very good tutorials on their site to get you started with.
Check out Shelly Cloud: https://shellycloud.com/ You get persistent storage (so you don't lose data in case of disk failure) and the deployment is optimized for Rails applications.
With Heroku you can host images that you store in the repository of your project. Just try this:
rails new mytest
create a simple page and link to a test image in your /app/assets/images
heroku create mytest123 # <-- mytest1234 must be your unique app name
and now push the repo to Heroku:
git push origin master # origin points automatically to Heroku after you created this
This is the easiest way to host small projects for free. Sometimes the Dyno takes some time to startup, and you need to point the domain to the right proxy, but these issues can be dealt with later.
S3 comes into play when you deal with uploaded content / images. For this use case, you need S3 which is out of the scope of your question too.
In my Rails app, for HIPAA reasons, I need to keep all my data stored on a separate server from my web application. This is simple to do with the database, but what's the best way to allow my rails app (on the web server) to access uploads on the filesystem of the database server? Or should I just store the uploads in the database (mysql)?
I'm using Rails 3.2 and Paperclip, but could switch to Carrierwave or another solution
Thanks!
Or should I just store the uploads in the database (mysql)
No. I will point you here for a better explanation Storing Images in DB - Yea or Nay?
what's the best way to allow my rails app (on the web server) to access uploads on the filesystem of the database server
I would probably create another web server with a separate rails app that was responsible solely for serving up files from it's local filesystem through some authenticated API.
It looks like people do use Amazon S3 successfully with HIPAA-compliant websites for file storage.
Can you create a HIPAA compliant Amazon S3 Web Application?
Amazon White Paper - Creating HIPAA-compliant Medical Data Applications with AWS
Googling "amazon hipaa compliance" turns up quite a bit of info. I would look into this before building my own infrastructure for storing files.
you can configure paper clip to store your documents on amazon s3
https://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip#storage
http://rubydoc.info/gems/paperclip/Paperclip/Storage/S3