How did this Ruby on Rails app get deployed?

Question

I have a Ruby on Rails app running on my server, and I can't figure out how it was deployed (someone else set it up).

The app is located in /var/www/myapp. Before it was deployed, I had been able to go in there and make minor edits to the app. The person helping me out with RoR then "deployed" it. It was unclear what deploying actually did, since it points to the same database and is on the same server. However, I can no longer edit it (or at least, the files I am editing are not being pointed to by the server).

Any way to figure out how this thing was deployed so I can take it down to edit it? Or should I basically just start over?

Answer 1

Was it maybe running in development mode before, and now it's in production? When it's in development mode, all of the files are loaded on each request, so your changes show up immediately. In production mode, you have to restart the server to see your changes.