Rails App Deployment

I’ve tried just about every installation methods to see what would be the best practice. I even tried fcgi and cgi against the advise of Ben. Thanks to Parallels on my Mac, this wasn’t that painful. Here are the observations from my experiment:

  • Using fcgi sucks and cgi is even worse, avoid at all cost.
  • Mongrel performs beautifully and clustering them is too simple (I feel guilty about it).
  • On shared hosting, unless they offer apache 2.2.x, use proxy to pass the request to mongrel. By the way, shared hosting is only good for light apps and should be avoided considering the fact that VPSs have come down in prices.
  • Proxy balancer on Apache and mongrel cluster is the only way to deploy.
  • Capistrano documentation sucks.
  • There are very little resources available. They all give you recipes, but as the saying goes, if you give a guy a fish, he’ll have a fish for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, then he’ll have it for life. I compiled Apache and mods myself to learn all the underlying concepts.
  • Debian Linux Etch is the best distro!

Pragmatic Bookshelf is coming out with a book on deploying and I hope it will save time for others.

June 16, 2007 | Filed Under Rant

Comments

5 Responses to “Rails App Deployment”

  1. Markus on September 17th, 2007 6:18 pm

    Could you recommend me a shared host that uses mongrel? I usually deploy my apps in fcgi shared host, but I have fed up of fgci crashes, timeouts and downtimes.

    Thanks!

  2. Markus on September 17th, 2007 6:24 pm

    One more thing. I think that Devian Etch is the best distro too, I used it in for a educational institution and works very very well on a PC with a PentiumIII with 128Mb of RAM, and it serves a stack of Apache 2.2.+, mongrel (3 clusters) and rails. Fantastic!

  3. Joon on September 17th, 2007 6:26 pm

    Rather than struggle with a shared hosting, I use VPS. I currently use PowerVPS. You can get one without cPanel for $24.95 for my apps and it’s working beautifully. I’ll ask around for good shared host provider.

  4. Joon on September 17th, 2007 6:28 pm

    Try clicking on the Blue Box. It looks like their plan is $19.95 for what you’re looking for, but for extra few bucks more, I would go with PowerVPS.com.

  5. Markus on September 18th, 2007 2:08 am

    I’ll check your references. Thanks!!

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