Life, IT & the Rest

The Book “Deploying Rails Applications” gives an good overview and tutorials on the infrastructure needed for a successfull web project. The central tool is the domain specific language for deployment capistrano which is inspired by rake, written in Ruby by Jamis Buck and integrated with the Ruby on Rails framework.

I really liked reading this clear and progressive book by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Bruce Tate, and Clinton Begin published by Pragmatic Programmers. The chosen analogy “moving into a new house” helps to understand why it is a good idea to automate server handling and web deployment. The main parts are

1. “bootstrap subversion” chapter on version control
2. hosting environments on shared and dedicated hosts.
3. The chapter on capistrano is the only printed documentation on that tool by now.
   Capistrano offers default deployment “tasks” for Ruby on Rails, but can be adopted e.g. for PHP Projects or admin tasks like key deployment, installation/compilation of software. Commands get pushed to servers in bash syntax via SSH in parallel. The servers can be grouped in “roles” like “web”, “db”, “all” or “most fancy customer”.
4. mongrel servers
5. scaling, performance
6. deployment on windows

Enjoy running around on O’Reilly Radar as “the last guy” in this browser game…

Like in real life: Make the crowd follow you && avoid the monsters && Have a lot of fun!