Deploying Rails

Summary

Deploying Rails takes you on a expertly guided tour of the current best practices in Rails deployment and management. You’ll find in-depth explanations on effectively running a Rails app by leveraging popular open source tools such as Puppet, Capistrano, and Vagrant. Then you’ll go beyond deployment and learn how to use Ganglia and Nagios to monitor your application’s health and gather metrics so you can head off problems before they happen.

You’ll start out by building your own virtual environment by writing scripts to provision a production server with Vagrant and Puppet. Then you’ll leverage the popular Rails deployment tool Capistrano to deploy an application into this infrastructure. Once the app is live, you’ll monitor your application’s health with Nagios, and configure Ganglia to collect system metrics. Finally, you’ll see how to keep your data backed up, recover data when things go wrong, tame your log files, and use Puppet to automate everything along the way.

Whether you’re a Rails developer who wants a better understanding of the needs of a production Rails system, if you’re a system administrator who wants to manage a Rails application, or if you’re bridging the gap between development and operations, this book will be your roadmap to successful production deployment and maintenance, whether your application has ten users or ten million users.

What You Need:

The exercises and examples are most suited to a computer running some Unix variant, such as Mac OS X or Linux. But a Windows machine running Linux in a VirtualBox virtual machine is also sufficient.

We’ll show you how to set up a local virtual machine for your deployments; you won’t need a dedicated server to hone your deployment skills. We expect you to have a basic familiarity with the Ruby programming language, the Ruby on Rails framework, and the Unix command line.

Author Info

Tom Copeland is also a Rails developer at LivingSocial. He has programmed in Ruby since 2004, consulted at InfoEther on Ruby on Rails applications since 2007, and received a “Ruby Hero” award in 2008. Before focusing on Ruby, he wrote two books on Java programming (“PMD Applied” and “Generating Parsers with JavaCC”) and was named Oracle’s “Open Source Developer of the Year” in 2003. Anthony Burns is a professional Ruby and Rails developer at LivingSocial. Prior to LivingSocial, he worked at InfoEther, a Rails consultancy, where he handled deployment and infrastructure for various clients.