Chef Kitchen for setting up servers with a standard Rails stack

https://github.com/federis/rails-fed-chef

by bcroesch • 12 years ago

12 6 12 years ago

sergiotapia3• 12 years ago

I hate this about deploying Rails applications. It's always a teeny tiny little thing, but it almost always ends up with a trip through random stackoverflow answers, comments, blog posts and the occasional doc filed under 'known issues'.

I have _only_ 1 production application hosted on a hand-built DigitalOcean stack - hell it was a such a process I wrote a guide on how to do it, mainly for my own benefit in the future.

http://tech.pro/tutorial/1335/devops-for-dummies-vps-configu...

Surprise surprise, I try to follow _my own guide_ on a new project I started and it doesn't work as expected. Either RVM changed since writing it, Ubuntu issue with locales preventing postgres from starting, or the odd issue with postgres not installing with a default user. It's a cluster.

Alright, enough fiddling about. I bought myself a book to learn from a professional [0]. Surprise surprise! Outdated not 1 month after it's been released. No longer working, again hunting down the comments area. :P

There's a reason why Heroku is so popular: it makes deployments mind-numbingly simple. (Plus you can scale, but let's worry about that after the app actually runs!)

I'm going to give this a shot using a brand new Ubuntu 13.10 x64 DigitalOcean VPS with a simple CRUD rails application I have. But I'd bet my left arm that something is going to go wrong and yet again I'll have to dive deep into the recesses of the web.

[0] https://leanpub.com/deploying_rails_applications

bcroesch2• 12 years ago

100% agree with you. FWIW, this is much more heavily tested on ubuntu 12.04. One of the reasons we submitted it was the hope that we'd get more people to test & contribute. Goal being that you don't necessarily have to pay for heroku & can still own your servers, but can set up a new server in just a few mins.

If you run into hiccups, feel free to hit me up directly - ben@federisgroup.com. The plus side of this is that once you do get it figured out once, setting up other servers really is extremely quick.

sergiotapia3• 12 years ago

Thanks for the offer, I appreciate it.

sergiotapia3• 12 years ago

If this doesn't use RVM how do you handle multiple applications on 1 server that may or may not have different Ruby versions?

bcroesch2• 12 years ago

We typically only put one app on a server, especially since Digital Ocean is so cheap. If things are tiny apps, we just stick them on a $5/mo 512mb droplet.

bradleyland• 12 years ago

I used to pursue this same goal. Then I decided to reclaim my sanity and stopped swimming upstream. I dropped RVM in production environments and started using ruby-build to drop a Ruby in /usr/local.

When you do this you drop a ton of configuration overhead involved with custom paths to your Ruby interpreter. That doesn't sound like much, but when you're fighting with environments in login vs non-login shells, cron jobs, remotely executed Capistrano tasks, etc, it's an overhead that I'm happy to have behind me.

If one of our Ruby apps require a different Ruby version, it goes on a different VM. Sounds like overkill, but you can get a VM down to $5/month from DigitalOcean. How much time is $5/month worth?

Chef Kitchen for setting up servers with a standard Rails stack

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