Chovy’s Blog

Capistrano is one of those problem solving apps that can be tricky to setup at first, but is a no-brainer once you’ve deployed with it.

I added a few notes about hosting on Dreamhost because they only support rails 2.2.2 at the time of this writing. My current app is actually developed under 2.3.2.

With Dreamhost, you only get a RAILS_ENV=’production’ setup on Passenger hosting…but that is good enough. I prefer to run test.the-app.com locally anyway.

If an app of mine gets popular, I would move it off of dreamhost regardless ( security, reliability, etc ). Try slicehost or linode if you’re looking for a more professional web hosting solution.

#create the_rails_app_production database
#setup db.the-rails-app.com db server
#setup domain the-rails-app.com to look in ./current

#!/bin/bash
cd ~/the_rails_app
mkdir config/deploy
for e in 'staging production testing'; do touch config/deploy/$e.rb; done;

echo '#!/bin/bash' > script/spin
echo 'touch tmp/restart' >> script/spin && chmod 755 script/spin

# dreamhost only:
# change config/environment.rb to require rails 2.2.2
# change config/database.yaml (production:) and delete the socket ref for mysql
# add symlink to older application.rb controller

svn ci -m 'initial capify'

capify .
cap deploy:setup
cap deploy:check
cap deploy:update #fix all errors until this succeeds
cap deploy:migrate #initial migration of db
#if using 2.2.2 be sure to symlink application_controller.rb to application.rb

cap deploy:start

# if you modify anything, be sure to checkin and deploy:update again

I have tried both mongrel and passenger rails hosting on Dreamhost.

Here are some pitfalls I found:

• no clustering (mongrel_cluster not installed)
• one proxy per app
• one mongrel per app
• apache + fastcgi works fine on the shared host plan
• PrivateSersver is 3 times the cost for 1/4 the performance
• your rails environment is *always* production
• they refuse to switch people back to shared.

I have about 30 domains, not a huge amount of traffic, well under “unlimited” … and now I’m paying $30-60/month for what cost me $10 before, nothing much gained from a rails standpoint, because I can’t host multiple environments anyway. The default environment supported for Passenger implementations is “production” — you could override that in the application’s configuration file, but it goes against the principle of easy deployment to any environment.

The disk reports as full at my usage of 6.1 gigs out of my 351 gigs allowed and I’m constantly getting “DISK QUOTA” errors to which they reply — “Naah…check your again.” After repeated emails, they ask what the command was again that caused the error (pasted in original ticket).

I have since started developing a rails app for Link directories on a Slicehost server instead, although the basic package is fairly limited (256mb ram) it handles pretty well with low traffic.