Deploying Rails Applications: A Step-By-Step Guide

First you'll learn how to build out your shared, virtual, or dedicated host. Then, you'll see how to build your applications for production and deploy them with one step, every time. Deploying Rails Applications will take you from a simple shared host through a highly scalable clustered and balanced setup with Nginx.

See how to tell whether you've bought enough firepower, and learn how to optimize your Rails projects applications in a systemic, rational way. Take advantage of advanced caching techniques, and become and expert with the latest servers in Nginx and Mongrel. Don't worry. You'll get a dose of Apache too.

Not only will you learn how to configure your production environment, you'll also see how to monitor it with free, automated tools that can restart your servers when the memory use gets too high for comfort. You'll see how to take a performance baseline, profile for bottlenecks, and solve the most common performance problems you're likely to see.

You'll learn:

Everything from source control and migrations to Capistrano, rake tasks and beyond.

Directly from authors who run EngineYard, one of the best Rails hosts in the business.

How to deploy your applications to multiple production servers with a single command using Capistrano.

How to setup a Rails/Nginx/Mongrel cluster for applications with high scalabilty needs.

...and more!

Rails Core developer Jose Valim guides you through seven different tutorials, each of them using test-driven development to build a new Rails extension or application that solves common problems with these new APIs. You will understand how the Rails rendering stack works and customize it to read templates from the database while you learn how to mimic Active Record behavior, like validations, in any other object. You will find out how to write faster, leaner controllers, and you'll learn how to mix Sinatra applications into your Rails apps, so you can choose the most appropriate tool for the job. In addition, you will improve your productivity by customizing generators and responders.

This book will help you understand Rails 3's inner workings, including generators, template handlers, internationalization, routing, and responders. With the knowledge you'll gain, you'll be ready to tackle complicated projects more easily than ever before, creating solutions that are well-tested, modular, and easy to maintain.

Everyone is talking about developing in Ruby on Rails. And while developing applications using Rails is pure joy, knowing how to deploy a Rails application in a real, live, production environment has so far been a lot harder.

Until now, the information you need has been highly fragmented and sometimes contradictory. But this book will change all of that: by consolidating all the hard-to-find options and advice you need, you can now deploy your applications in the best possible way. You'll learn all about the full range of options for production Rails deployment, from security to scalability and more, using apache, lighthttpd, Mongrel, and even Microsoft Windows.

This book will help you sleep better at night, knowing that your application can handle anything that gets thrown at it. Come away with the knowledge of how to optimize your Rails projects for speed and concurrency. You'll take advantage of advanced caching techniques and become an expert in lighttpd and Apache server environments.

No longer will it be trial and error when it comes time to go live with your gem of an application. You'll not only learn the how of configuring your production environment, you will also learn the theory behind it so you can adapt and keep up with new methodologies as Rails technologies rapidly advance.

Clinton Begin is the creator of iBATIS. Clinton has been a professional software developer for eight years and currently works for ThoughtWorks. He is an active mentor, trainer, and public speaker in the IT industry.