How to configure and deploy Ruby on Rails Application on server using apache, heroku or Phusion Passenger dont know about such terms

Question

I am new to Ruby on Rails. I have been working as junior developer and most of time working on localhost so don't know how to launch Ruby on rails application, How to Configure Ruby on rails application and how to deploy it.

often I came accross following terms but don't know It's meaning and how to use them and where to use them .

Apache

Phusion Passenger

Heroku

nginx

Please Help me and also looking forward to any good tutorial to learn all that terms.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I think there is quite a lot of resources on the web for this, but :

• Heroku is a platform as a service. Basically, you push your rails app to a git remote, and that's it, deployed. You can manage addons, workers, and processes from CLI, and scale up/down if you need. Probably the most painless way to start with.

• Apache & nginx are two werbservers, I'd say they are the most common in the rails world. Nginx is the latest of the two and it seems to be better for most of the tasks, but if you want to know which to choose, there is several posts on the internet for that too.

• Phusion passenger is the bridge (or one of the available bridges) between your rails app and your webserver. If you've done php before, think of it as mod_php.

Answer 2

Since this is all new to you I'd advise that you start with hosting on Heroku. You can do a lot with the free version and it's arguably the easiest way to get started with hosting your rails website. Check out the getting started guide from Heroku. There's also another beginners guide here .

Once you feel comfortable with Heroku your next step could be looking into hosting on your own virtual private server (VPS). The setup is much more manual but things that would cost extra money on Heroku are now free if you set it up yourself on your VPS. Here is a great article on VPS hosting.

For reference, I was hosting websites on Heroku for about a year before I started looking into hosting on my own VPS. Now what I do is start by hosting my projects on Heroku since it's the fastest way to get up and running. Then if the website is successful I transition to a VPS.