I use Heroku to host and deploy a lot of little apps, in the past I remember ftp'ing and then Capistrano came around and made things a lot better.
Is Capistrano still the default deployment method or are there up and coming techniques or existing methods to deploy rails apps.
Capistrano is still at the state of the art, generally used with github.
Of course the easiest way to host your apps is Heroku if don't have your own server.
+1 on the other Heroku and Capistrano answers.
Outside of that, I'm particularly looking forward to seeing what VMWare's CloudFoundry has in store for us. One step deploys (and upgrades) very similar to Heroku, and you can actually host your own clouds if you want to. It's still in beta, but looks pretty slick from what I've been following of it. Supports Ruby (Rails, Sinatra, et al), Node, Java, and others.
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I am using Heroku as a staging / testing server. For production, I plan to deploy to EC2, initially on 1 instance but the deployment should scale to multiple instances when needed. A quick search shows that there are web tools like Rubber and Chef which are designed for multi-EC2 instances deployment. But they do not look easy to grasp - atleast on first look.
I also see a simple guide here:
http://boredwookie.net/index.php/blog/ruby-on-rails-3-passenger-mysql-on-amazon-ec2/
which looks more easy to follow. But I'm not sure how easy or hard it would be to scale up to multiple servers if needed later if I follow these steps.
Any guidance in this direction is much appreciated.
Have a look at the Ruby Bitnami stack.
http://bitnami.org/stack/rubystack
There is a AMI, installs very quick in EC2. Without to much fuzz. When it comes to scaling i don't know, but i guess its a good starting point.
I find it easy to find resources on amazon/online to learn new frameworks/programming languages. However, when it comes to web app deployment, I find it really hard to find a single resource that explains all. Most of them just tell you what to do without explaining 'why'.
I just did my second rails app deployment with unicorn and nginx. Although I 'kind of' know what is going on when reading the tutorial, I would like to know more about the 'how' and 'why' of the steps that were given.
In short, I would like to read books/articles/tutorials (hopefully all-in-one) about best practices for web app deployment, and how to scale/load-balance your app when it gets more traffic (and hopefully it the tutorial uses NGINX/unicorn setup).
Well, deployment and scaling are completely orthogonal topics, so I don't think you'll find an article/tutorial that covers both.
As for deployment, you better automate your work. When you deploy to 100+ servers, the last thing you want to do is to do it manually (fetch from git, migrate db, restart servers, etc).
Capistrano - very well known and adopted tool for deploying Rails.
Vlad - another tool that gains more attention lately.
Chef - very powerful tool for server management. Several top Russian sites use it.
We have a very simple function (We look something up from a third party database and return an answer. It's literally five lines of code.) We would like to offload this task from our main server because we expect a high volume of traffic for this one function and would like to optimize it.
We are thinking about testing the promise of many cloud/PaaS providers, where they handle scaling and performance responsibilities.
We're most interested in Rails environments, but are curious to hear experiences from others about any company in the space.
Here are the PaaS companies we found that supports Rails:
1) Heroku
2) DotCloud
3) Duostack
Questions:
1) Do you know of other Rails-specific companies? Also feel free to list non-Rails companies since we're interested in following other companies in case they eventually provide Rails support.
2) How has your experience been with these companies?
Foreword and disclaimer: I work for DotCloud; so the following might be biased. You've been warned.
DotCloud could be interesting for you if you like the following features:
run something else than Ruby (what about some Django or Pylons code talking with your SQL DB? Or even some PHP blog like WordPress or Drupal, using the same user authentication database?)
experiment with databases like Redis or MongoDB, or background ruby workers, without paying for add-ons
SSH access, crontab access (without requiring an add-on)
cheaper workers (I didn't come up with this one; some of our users coming from the Heroku world told us that workers were insanely expensive there)
Duostack is indeed very nice if you want to mix specifically Rails and Node.js. I've been told that they had awesome auto-configuration facilities.
Finally, if you only plan to do Rails and nothing else, ever, you might as well stick with Heroku since they've been in that business for a while, and are probably more mature than the first two of the batch.
Shameless plug: DotCloud is offering a beta test drive; so if you want to see what it looks like, just subscribe to the beta and you will be quickly enough be able to see for yourself. Heroku has a free tier as well.
You could add EngineYard in the mix - but i'd be inclined to use Heroku as my first choice, Dotcloud second (it's a newish product, and is very good but still in development)
If you want more control over your app/servers or want to run it on any cloud or your own infrastructure without having to download/deploy anything, you can try Cloud 66 (www.cloud66.com)
Disclaimer: I work for Cloud 66
A lot has changed on the scene since this question was asked. We recently looked into these services and settled on Heroku, but even more recently decided to continue managing my own deployments directly on EC2. Here are some points not mentioned in the other answers.
Heroku
Now supports much more than just ruby
Has really great-looking support for PostgreSQL
Uses LXC for process containers, like DotCloud
DotCloud
Is now Docker, and is putting a lot of manpower into developing docker.io
Doesn't have a free tier any more
I'm not sure if DotCloud is using Docker internally or not, since the docs say explicitly it isn't production-ready yet.
Our decision to stick with plain EC2 was motivated by the fact that it's cheaper and affords a lot more flexibility. For example, we use local-only http servers behind our public server to do some of our request processing, which doesn't really fit into the PaaS models out there. We would have had to reimplement all our back-end components as redis workers, and pay for them as additional dynos. The fact that Amazon RDS now supports PostgreSQL was also a compelling factor. Incidentally, Amazon has a full-stack PaaS offering as well, Elastic Beanstalk.
Just stumbled upon the question. There are similar ones around here. The problem is also: The PaaS scene is changing very quickly. New vendors are popping in every week or so.
Nowadays OpenShift from Red Hat might also be mentioned here as a Ruby PaaS.
OFFTOPIC + shameless plug: I have compiled a list of PHP PaaS here: http://blog.fortrabbit.com/comparing-cloud-hosting-platforms/
Is there a "best" rails server to use for development (mongral, webrick, etc..)? Or does it not really matter?
Short answer: develop on what you will deploy on.
Long answer: good Rails containers, like Unicorn, Thin, etc, really don't impact your development much but will impact production. And, each has just enough configuration related quirks that interact with your code and choice of gems that just diving in and working in that environment can save a lot of time, even if using continuous integration, but especially if not.
The "best" in my opinion is Passenger in conjunction with your choice of Apache or nginx, whichever you're familiar with. It's perhaps the only game in town when it comes to getting an application running quickly and reliably. The Phusion team has invested a lot of time and effort into building a complete package for a scalable deployment platform.
Mongrel is only designed to be part of your stack and requires a number of supporting pieces to work properly. It also has to be managed with a separate process launcher and that can be frustrating and can cause serious issues if done wrong. Mongrel2 is a better platform but will need some time to be properly assimilated by the Rails community.
Webrick was never intended as a production web server. It is only a toy server for testing. It is painfully slow and can only service one request at a time.
See my answer here Recommendations (and Differences) between different Ruby on Rails Production Web Servers
What is the ideal rails server? Lets assume its on a VPS, such as Linode. Lets assume that any of the sites won't become the next twitter, but they should scale well. It must also support multiple sites and all sites are rails 3. And the database must be on the same server (for now).
Should it use apache or nginx?
Ruby Enterprise Edition or just normal Ruby?
Ideal linux distro?
MySQL, PostgreSQL or something else?
How should the directories be laid out (where to put your rails sites or anything else)?
Deployment options?
Anything else?
Should it use apache or nginx?
Nginx seems to be the preferred route here, unless you need specific Apache features. If you're using Passenger, both Apache and Nginx are supported. More on Passenger here.
Ruby Enterprise Edition or just normal Ruby?
I'm pretty sure REE is only available for Ruby 1.8, which isn't really the preferred version for Rails 3 anymore. Rails 3 had some problems with 1.8, but they might have fixed them by now. Generally, though, Ruby 1.9.2 runs Rails 3 well.
Ideal linux distro?
This really doesn't matter. If you're not sure, Ubuntu is a good choice as there's a lot of knowledge out there, and it's pretty easy to use. Slicehost has a bunch of great articles on getting started with a VPS, and a lot of them focus specifically on Ubuntu: http://articles.slicehost.com/.
MySQL, PostgreSQL or something else?
This is definitely subjective. MySQL is definitely the most common out there, and if you're really unsure, it's a good starting point. However, people often argue that PostgreSQL is cleaner and easier to use that MySQL. If you're just starting, I would recommend MySQL just because of the amount of information out there already.
How should the directories be laid out (where to put your rails sites or anything else)?
You can put your rails project anywhere you like, so I like to just put it in my home directory. Just make sure that your web server has access to your static assets.
Deployment options?
Capistrano is popular. You just commit your changes and cap deploy, and you'll be up and running.
Anything else?
If this all seems overwhelming, look into a simpler solution like Heroku. They set everything up for you, and, while you loose some flexibility, you won't have to worry about any of this. Their pricing isn't too bad, and they offer a free option.
I think kyl summed it up pretty well. But I figured I would let you know exactly what I have been using since rails beta4 (and now with RC). This setup has worked well for me:
Rackspace Cloud servers - Gives you full control of the server. You can resize your servers on the fly. You can also take snapshot images if you want to duplicate your setup for another site. Its cheap and in my opinion better than Amazon cloud.
CentOS 5.4 - solid, but as kyl mentioned probably any distro will work fine.
Ruby 1.9.2RC 2 - no problems so far on Rails 3 for me. Will definitely use Ruby Enterprise when they port it to 1.9.2 (not sure if that is in the works, though??)
Nginx - fast and lightweight. I like it much better than apache. Works well in front of Passenger, mongrel and thin.
MySQL - just personal preference for this. I have been using it for years. It is easy to set up a master/slave or master/master config if you need to scale. Some people have success just using sqlite, but I prefer something a bit more robust.
Github - a must for me for source code control. Bundler works very well with github
Application Server - I am still debating what to do about this. I was happy with Passenger 2.2.15 until I saw how long it took to spawn new ruby processes to handle concurrency. It takes up to 30 seconds to spawn a new process for me and the app is locked, so no requests can go thru while it is spawning. I am investigating right now if it is my app or Rails 3 that takes so long to load. This problem is fixed with Passenger 3, though. Hopefully that will be released soon. As a result of this, I am probably going to use Thin or Mongrel until Passenger 3 comes out.
Capistrano - works great for Rails 3. I would recommend finding some cap recipes for versioning your app with git tags... or just write your own.
Anything else? Not really related to the server, but I would recommend using the new plugin API for any part of your app that is reusable. Read up on railties and engines. Its simple to create a gem with Jeweler and version it with github using jeweler rake tasks. Then you can deploy from a github tag or from master, by adding the gem and github source in your Gemfile and bundle install or update it. I recently ported all of my common app code (blog, authentication, etc..) to Rails 3 engines and it is working great. And any time I need to reuse that code, I just drop it in the new app's Gemfile.