Deploying RailsIt’s easier than it looks

!Ben Dixon, @talkingquickly

@talkingquickly

About Me

• Rails Developer, author of “Reliably Deploying Rails Applications”

• Teach people to make stuff with Ruby at MakeItWithCode.com

• Make cool swim technology stuff with SwimIO helloswimio.com (swim watches, the speedo app etc)

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Overview

• “git push heroku” is awesome

• But “Server stuff” isn’t that scary

• Once you know it, you can do cool stuff with it

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Terminology

• “PaaS” = Platform as a service = something like Heroku

• VPS = Virtual Private Server = A Linux Server in the “Cloud” = “Box”

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Behind the scenes

• How does “rails server” become a production setup?

• how to go from Rails S on dev machine to a production application?

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A Simple Configuration

Web ServerE.g. Nginx, Apache

App Server E.g. Unicorn, Thin,

WebrickDatabase Server

VPS

A Request

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The Web Server

• Nginx/ Apache

• First point of contact when a request comes in

• If it’s for a static file (like a picture) then deals with it directly

• If it’s for part of our Rails app, sends it to the app server

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The App Server

• When you run “rails server”, this is what you’re starting

• E.g. Webrick, Thin, Unicorn

• This is the “rails app”

• The web server passes requests to this and it returns responses to the web server

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The Database Server

• E.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL etc

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Recap

Web ServerE.g. Nginx, Apache

App Server E.g. Unicorn, Thin,

WebrickDatabase Server

VPS

A Request

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But Why?

• More bang for your buck

• Background Jobs you can have lots and lots of them

• It makes working with a PaaS easier

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But Why?

• Your infrastructure becomes another one of your tools for making cool stuff

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Don’t Do It Like I Did

• Get a VPS, Google “How to Setup a Rails VPS”

• Type in a lot of commands by hand

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Why Not?

• When you need to setup another one, you’ll be back to square one

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How To Do it: Configuration Management

• Automates the commands you would type in to setup a server

• Once you’ve done it once, doing it again is trivial

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Configuration Management Example

• 1m30 Video of setting up a server with chef

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How To Do it: Configuration Management

• Configuration Management is “DRY” for setting up servers

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What about deployment?

• But “git push heroku" is awesome!

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How To Do It: Deployment Automation

• Automates the commands needed to copy a new version of your code to the server

• You can still deploy with just one command e.g. “cap production deploy”

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Deployment Automation Example

• 2m30 video of setting up and deploying with Capistrano

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What about when it breaks?

• If something breaks, it should self heal as much as possible, if it can’t it should alert you

• Use “Monitoring” tools e.g. Monit

• Your configuration management is responsible for setting all this up

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First Stack• Suggested First Stack:

• NGinx (Web Server)

• Unicorn (App Server)

• PostgreSQL (Database Server)

• Monit (Monitoring)

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Toolbox

• Chef Solo + Knife (Server Provisioning)

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Toolbox

• Capistrano 3 (Deployment Automation)

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Next Steps

• Get a VPS! (Digital Ocean, Linode)

• 1GB + (512Mb Not Worth the Hassle)

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Next Steps

• http://www.talkingquickly.co.uk/deploying_rails

• More in depth, my book “Reliably Deploying Rails Applications”

• Come and talk to me (@talkingquickly on twitter)

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Any Questions?

• Ben Dixon // @talkingquickly

• Resources: http://www.talkingquickly.co.uk/deploying_rails