I set up hoptoad on my prod server and ran rake hoptoad:test. I get the notifier in my hoptoad interface so it seems to work great. But then I forgot to migrate my database after my last deploy so I got a "ActionView::TemplateError" in my production log. This caused a 500 so I feel like HopToad should have notified me about this. Have any hoptoad users out there had this issue?
As a side note, is it standard practice to have your deploy process automatically migrate your production database?
Thanks!
As a side note, is it standard
practice to have your deploy process
automatically migrate your production
database?
The choice belongs to you. It's a standard practice to use Capistrano for deploying Rails apps. With capistrano you can run
cap deploy # to deploy the app
cap deploy:migrate # to migrate the app
cap deploy:migrations # to deploy and migrate at the same time
You can decide whether to execute the commands separately or not.
About hoptoad, I'm sorry but I don't have a Rails app with hoptoad installed to test against.
Did you have any exception notification or logging plugins installed before hoptoad? If so, make sure you remove them. I had minor issues setting up hoptoad because of this interference.
Make sure your production server is set to the RAILS_ENV "production". Development doesn't trigger hoptoad.
Related
I have successfully managed to set up a VPS production server (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) from the excellent Railscasts episode. It's an "internal" server (not live yet), so I've been building my app locally and doing a cap deploy at regular intervals to check that things are running smoothly.
However, what I'd like to do now is delete all records on the production server (as I've just been testing stuff) - that is, to start with a completely empty database for when the site actually goes live to the public.
Obviously, I can do this locally by running something like rake db:reset, but how do I do this on the production server? Should I be adding some code to my deploy.rb file?
I'm a bit of a noob at this, but I've been unable to find anything via a Google search.
** EDIT ** Oh, and obviously this is a one-off - once things go live, I'll remove any code which deletes records!
You can ssh into the server and run any rake command from the application directory. You could create a Capistrano task just to run this one rake task, but since this task is obscenely dangerous with any real system I would not recommend it. The last thing you would want is to accidentally run it.
Is there an issue with developing my site on my macbook and then moving to a server when done? Will there be issues I need to plan ahead for? DB or ruby related maybe? Dependencies or something a server could have different from my dev environment that could cause a nightmare later? I'd rather develop it offline since it'd be faster and wouldn't require an internet connection but in the past I've always done everything with live sites so this would be a first, and I am new to ruby on rails.
Developing locally and then deploying to your server(s) via something like capistrano is standard practise.
It's a good idea to keep your development environment as close as possible to your production environment (ruby versions, database versions etc). Bundler makes keeping your gems in sync easy
I used Heroku for some projects. The deployment was as easy as it could be. I just did a git push and it worked without problems... I really like bundler and rake :-)
Your Question embodies THE way to develop in Rails. Your development environment is an offline representation of what you're production site will be.
A quick workflow analysis for you could be:
rails new ~/my_app -d postgresql; cd ~/my_app; rm public/index.html
Next, create the database:
bundle exec rake db:create:all
Now you'll have the db and app all set up, let's set up your main pages:
bundle exec rails generate controller Site index about_us contact_us
Now you'll have something to see on the site, so run:
bundle exec rails server
This server acts as your offline connection and will handle the rendering of any text, images, html etc you want to serve in your rails app. Now you can join in the debates of TDD, to TATFT or JITT, rspec vs test::unit. Welcome.
Developing locally is definitely the way to go. However, I would look into getting it on production as soon as possible and pushing often. This way you can see changes happen as you make them and are aware of any possible breaking changes.
I use heroku a lot and when I start a new project I push it to heroku almost immediately. While developing, I can publish new changes simply by git push heroku master. Everyone has to find their own workflow, but this has always worked well for me.
If you are interested in Heroku here is a good link to get you started:
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/rails3
I've setup my app to run on Heroku with a staging and production environment as according to their documents. http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/multiple-environments
It seems pretty straightforward to manage with the staging app, push entire deployments or new branches up to test in staging. What I wonder is how to manage the production version.
How do I keep my production up and running when deploying new code? Do I pull in the changes from staging or do I redeploy the entire app with the changes merged in?
Secondly, how do I manage and keep my database intact during all of this? I'm used to running locally where if you do a new deploy and a new rake :db:migrate, you lose all your database data. How is this done in production to not lose your records?
Thanks you and ANY other tips regarding heroku management is welcome.
Typically, you make changes locally, including migrations or whatever. Before pushing your changes to your production app, push changes to your staging app to double-check things are okay.
If you added migrations in your changes, be sure to run heroku run rake db:migrate to migrate your staging database. Running rake db:migrate should not destroy any data so long as your migration is proper - i.e. no weird tampering with data, just the standard addition/renaming/etc. of columns or introducing new tables. (Obviously if you drop a table in a migration it'll be gone.)
Then, if everything is okay with your staging app, push changes to your production, and again run heroku run rake db:migrate if you had any new migrations. If things are not okay, run heroku help to get a list of commands you can use - particularly ones with regard to releases so you can revert back to a previous release. Also heroku logs is really useful, and heroku console (actual command might be slightly different), though when you start a console, be really careful not to tamper with data too much.
With Heroku, there's no deploy command needed - right when you git push, your updated code is there. No "cap deploy" with capistrano, if you've used that before.
Hope this helps.
I have a deployed Rails application that I'd like to use with Hoptoad (an online exception notification service). It comes packaged in a gem that I installed on my deployment server, but I need to run the script/generate hoptoad every time I deploy to configure it because the Hoptoad config files/changes exist only on my production application (and not on my development, so when I deploy, they all get erased).
Is there an easy way to run that script/generate on the production server every time I deploy? I feel like you could do this with Capistrano tasks, but I don't know how to do that.
What do people usually do for this? Sorry if this post is a little hard to understand, I'm not quite sure how to explain the issue.
Thanks!
You can add the Hoptoad configuration file to your source code repository so that it gets deployed as part of the Rails application.
Alternatively, if you don't want that information within your repository, then upload the config file to your production server (outside of Capistrano's normal releases directory structure) and have Capistrano create a symbolic link to it as part of the deployment process. I provided an answer to a similar question here which should give you the idea.
I have a app that I'm deploying to a development server using Capistrano. I'd like to force this deployment to use the development database. So far the only way I've managed to do it is to make my production database info in database.yml equal to the development info. But this is a complete hack.
I've tried setting rails_env to development in deploy.rb but that hasn't worked.
Thoughts?
I ended up using the solution over here. Basically a recipe to replace a line in environment.rb after deploy but before restart.
The problems seems to be with DreamHost's Passenger config. It assumes you're running in production mode.
I'd use Capistrano Ext in order to define multiple deployment environments. I have used this in the past to deply staging and production installations of my apps, so I think it'd work well for you.
Jamis Buck has a writeup if you'd like an overview on how to use it.