Rails deployment

Question

Hello, I am new to Rails. I have my rails application and now I want to deploy it. What do i need to deploy my rails application? Do i need an IAS server or Apache would do it all? I am very confused because I have never deployed any website before

Answer 1

Rails will run on a variety of different servers and configurations nowadays. Phusion Passenger is one that is very popular that supports Apache or the Nginx web server. Mongrel and Thin are also commonly used.

You don't say whether you have a specific host in mind. For a newcomer especially, I can't recommend Heroku highly enough. You can create a free account with them and deploy very easily. Essentially you check your code into a Git repository hosted by Heroku, register your application with them through their command line interface and then you can deploy. The entire process literally only takes a few minutes.

• I recommend that you take a look at Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails tutorial which has a section (1.4) on deployment to Heroku and also covers using Git amongst other topics

If you are hosting your application on your own server then be aware that Capistrano is pretty much the standard tool for creating repeatable deployments of Rails applications. Slicehost have an excellent series of detailed articles that cover pretty much every aspect of deploying a Rails application to your own server.