Web App Deployment

Have battled to deploy my first Rails 3.1 / jQuery Mobile site over the last couple of days. It is finally live at www.skorebug.com (the jQuery Mobile but begins when you try and log in!)

A couple of things that bogged me down for ages:

• How to deploy? The Rails world seems to love Capistrano – but for a single developer/single server website it seemed overkill. Was tempted to just manually ftp files to my server but that made me feel yucky. Finally found a nice compromise using git. Probably millions like it – but this blog post got me started: http://pixelhum.com/blog/using-git-for-deployment
• Setting up the server? Part 1: How to actually install Ruby, Rails, Rubygems etc. I had used rvm in dev and liked the idea of using it too. Battled with a bunch of things till I uncovered this: https://github.com/joshfng/railsready It was an absolute life saver and took care of all the ‘boring bits’ nicely 😉
• Setting up the server? Part 2: Where to put the files (used it in dev – seemed like a good idea) and a bunch of other questions. The Rails community seems to have great materials on how to get started with the dev bit – but I really struggled to find good resources about deployment (that weren’t 60 pages long). The secret that didn’t seem well documented is to point your web server at the /public directory of your Rails app (and essentially copy everything from your dev environment to production). This seemed counter-intuitive at first – since on Rails 3.1 I had never touched the /public directory (other than to delete index.html 😉 I guess that is the price you pay for starting to learn Rails 3.1 whilst it is still unreleased.
• X-Sendfile!!! At this point the basic app was working nicely except for images. It puzzled me for ages – but eventually discovered that X-Sendfile had to be configured for my web server (Apache in this case). Again something that was not obvious from the documentation. Even the apparent option on config/environments/production.rb to disable X-Sendfile didn’t seem to work as expected. So yes – you need to make sure that X-sendfile is installed on your web server and enabled for each of your Apache VirtualHosts. I did find a reported ‘Issue’ under the Rails project on github – it seems that something has changed in 3.1 in this regard – but as a n00b – it made no sense whatsoever 😉

So finally – a process that should have taken a couple of hours was finished after a couple of days – but at least it is finished!!

(Note the site itself is functional – but far from “finished” – so if you are one of the three people in the world that read this post and go to the site (Hi Mum!!) – please be gentle 😉