Rails Deployment Roundup: Dreamhost with mod_rails, Capistrano 2.3, Book

Posted by Werner Schuster on May 14, 2008 08:30 PM

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Ruby

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Ruby on Rails,

Deployment / Datacenter

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Rails,

Book,

Ruby on Rails,

Deployment

Web hosting company Dreamhost caused a stir in the Rails community earlier this year by talking about the problems it experienced with offering Rails application hosting to it's users. (See David Heinemeier Hansson's reply to Dreamhost's statements). Now, Dallas Kashuba, on the Dreamhost blog, writes that the issues Dreamhost encountered were resolved with the aid of Phusion Passenger/mod_rails:

From now on, deploying a Rails application may very well be as simple as ‘Upload’. Passenger automatically detects the presence of a Ruby on Rails application and launches it for you in the background, leaving it running for the subsequent requests. [..] All you do is enable the Ruby on Rails Passenger (mod_rails) option for any existing or new web domain in the DreamHost web control panel. When you then point that domain’s web directory to the public directory of an existing Ruby on Rails application it will work automatically.

Read InfoQ's interview with one of the Phusion Passenger/mod_rails developers for details about the project.
The Phusion Passenger/mod_rails team is continuing working on the project - for more current updates, check the Phusion Passenger/mod_rails blog or catch the team at RailsConf in late May.

Tom Copeland, who maintains RubyForge, posts a Capistrano task to update a Rails application running on Passenger Phusion/mod_rails. The task actually just consists touching the applications "restart.txt", which will cause Passenger Phusion/mod_rails to restart the application.

Jamis Buck reports the release of Capistrano 2.3.0. Jamis mentions the big change for 2.3:

Capistrano 2.3 is primarily significant in that it switches to the new Net::SSH v2 library, which is faster and slimmer than the older Net::SSH v1 library. It also pulls in Net::SFTP v2, and the new Net::SSH::Gateway and Net::SCP libraries.

Check the blog entry for a full list of new features, look for or report bugs at Lighthouse or check Jamis Buck's projects - including Capistrano - at Github.

Finally, the long awaited "Deploying Rails Applications: A Step-by-Step Guide" by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Bruce Tate, and Clinton Begin is now available.

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