Deploying Rails app to a VPS

Question

I've been building my first site using Rails, and I want to get it live. Up to now I've only ever put a site live by just dropping all the files onto my VPS via FTP, and I know that's not how it works with a Rails app.

What I don't know is where to even begin with making sure Rails is installed on my VPS (it's Linux based, I bought a package from Webfusion), and then how to deploy it and get it all running properly. My VPS has Plesk 10 installed on it, and from what I've read I need to install Rails alongside Plesk? I may have the wrong end of the stick, so don't hold back if I'm saying stupid things.

I realise this is a really green question to ask, but I've scoured forums looking for a solution I can understand and come up with nothing, so hoping someone here can help.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I've never used a control panel like Plesk but I do have a VPS at linode.com. To get my rails sites up and running I got help from a smashingmagazine blog post and pro railscast episode . The railscast episode is not free but it has great info.

There are a lot of details with each step of getting a rails web server running on a VPS so please look at the blog or railscast video. But a high level overview of the steps is:

1. install rvm
2. install ruby and ruby gems
3. install rails
4. install a rails web server (a common option is passenger and nginx)
5. install a database (postgres is a common option)
6. capistrano for deployment

Answer 2

I wrote an ebook an this topic. After explaining how to set up a server from scratch it focuses on how to deploy an application manually, helping you to understand how this process works under the hood (I left automation out intentionally).

It covers a nginx/Unicorn/MySQL/rbenv setup. If you think that's something for you, you can get it here (it's free for people on my mailing list).