How to update Ruby on Rails app after deployment?

Question

Let's say I have deployed my Rails app on a VPS, and everything works fine. MySQL is populating.

Then I wanna change the functionality or view of the app. What should I do next?

Probably using CentOS, Passanger, nginx, MySQL and GIT.

Answer 1

You can use capistrano to deploy new versions of your application.

The idea is to develop locally, run and test the application locally.
And when you're ready to deploy, you use capistrano to update the source code in the production server.

Answer 2

There's several tools that can help you with this kind of things, I think the most widely used is Capistrano. But in essence it's nothing magical. Upload the new code and it should be ready to go. If you have done any modifications to the database, you should take the app offline before upgrading it, then run migrations, and go back online again.

Answer 3

It helps to understand about database migrations too.