I’ve been working on learning how to deploy a rails app without the help of Heroku. You might ask why I would want to do that. That’s a really good question that I ask myself everytime I can’t figure things out for hours on end. I won’t answer that question now. I’ll leave that for the last post I make on RailsDeploy.

My teacher is the author of Fearless Rails Deployment. If you preorder his book, he’ll let you view the draft so far. I don’t want to give away anything that is in his book, so I’m just gonna skim over what I’ve learned.

I deployed using capistrano. This will create the capistrano files:

cap install

To use capistrano you’ll need to be able to ssh authenticate with ssh key instead of password. Here is a great tutorial on how to do that.

First, I needed to install unicorn as my rails server. This part was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. After adding the gem and installing it, I just made a unicorn config file and ran unicorn.

vim /etc/unicorn/mahcloud.rb

pid '/home/root/mahcloud/tmp/unicorn.pid'
working_directory '/home/root/mahcloud/'

The config file has a little more to it than that.