Boxcar Conductor: Rails deployment made easy
In a previous post, I showed how we’ve been working on an interactive deployment process for Rails applications to reduce the time it takes to deploy to a Boxcar.
We began to move our Boxcar deployment recipes into it’s own Rails plugin and just made it available on GitHub.
Introducing Boxcar Conductor
The Boxcar Conductor plugin aims to automate the entire process for deploying to your Boxcar. We’re down to just a few simple commands to run to get your application up and running. While mileage may vary with other hosting providers, we did want to open up this work to the community and centralize our work with the community of Boxcar customers who have helped us build and test these tools.
Install Boxcar Conductor
If you’re running on Edge Rails… you can take advantage of the new support for installing plugins in git repositories.
$ ./script/plugin install git://github.com/robbyrussell/boxcar-conductor.git
note: If you’re not using edge rails, you can download a tarball and install the plugin manually.
Installing the plugin will add a custom Capfile and config/deploy.rb, which has a few things for you to define based on your Boxcar subscription.
Configure Your Boxcar
Once the plugin is installed, you can run the following task:
$ cap boxcar:config
This will ask you a few questions about your deployment needs.
- Which database server will you be using? (along with db user/pass info)
- How many mongrels should run in your cluster?
After a few quick multiple choice answers, you’re application is ready to be deployed and you can run an Boxcar-specific deployment task.
$ cap deploy
We’ve also created a new public project on Lighthouse so that you can submit tickets and ideas to us. With Boxcar, we’re really aiming to remove as many steps from the deployment process that aren’t necessary.
To follow along, visit the project on lighthouse or GitHub.
If you’re interested in learning more about Rails Boxcar, feel free to drop us a line.
Related Posts
Announcing Cobalt and monthly subscriptions for Boxcar 2
We’ve been designing and developing a new centralized billing platform over the past few months and late last week, we launched it! Along with this new billing platform, we launched another new application, Cobalt, which is a new account management and support tool for our hosting customers.
We’ll be migrating all of our past customers over to this new system in time, but are initially using it for new Boxcar customers.
We’ve been building the new system to use Braintree as our new credit card payment gateway. With this switch, we’re also introducing monthly subscription rates for Boxcar, which means that you can try it out month-to-month now.
Over the next few weeks/months, we’ll be announcing several features to Cobalt that will ease your Rails deployment experience.
I want to thank all those on my team that helped get these new applications up and running.
If you’re looking for professional VPS-based Rails hosting, hop on our train by ordering a Boxcar today for $99/month!
For more information, visit railsboxcar.com or Planet Argon.
Also, be sure to follow Boxcar on twitter.
Launch your own RubyURL 1
A few weeks ago, I moved RubyURL from subversion to git. During that process, I decided to use my invite to GitHub and have decided to go ahead and open up the source code.
It’s currently a whopping 92 LOC with a 1:2.5 code to spec ratio. (I had a goal to keep is below 100 LOC)
- RubyURL on GitHub: http://github.com/robbyrussell/rubyurl
- Public Clone URL: git://github.com/robbyrussell/rubyurl.git
Feel free to grab it and help contribute. This has served almost 14 million redirects since August 2007 and is running on a Rails Boxcar.
To grab it with git.. run: git clone git://github.com/robbyrussell/rubyurl.git.
Feel free to submit tickets to the Rubyurl ticket system.
Enjoy!
UPDATE Ryan McGeary was kind enough to be the first person to help track down a bug and submit patches. :-)
Deploying Rails with an interactive Capistrano recipe to your Boxcar 1
I wanted to share something that I’ve been meaning to share on here.
When we began planning Rails Boxcar, we really want to reduce the amount of work that it took to setup and deploy a VPS for a Rails application. During this period, we began to look at the deployment process itself and began working on an interactive tool for developers for setting up their deployment environment on their Boxcar instances. So, we worked with few customers to develop an interactive Capistrano recipe.
The Goal? Spend less time configuring the server or editing recipe files.
During the initial setup, we can have the customer provide a few details from the safety of their Rails application directory by answering the following.
- What database server will you be using? (PostgreSQL or MySQL)
- What port does your database run on? (if different than the default for your db server)
- What is your database username?
- What is your database user’s password?
- What port will your mongrel cluster start with?
- How many mongrel servers should your cluster run?
Great… setup the server and let’s deploy!
Feel free to snag our interactive Capistrano2 recipe.
We’re trying to take the pain out of deploying your Ruby on Rails applications with Boxcar.
On a side note, we’re in the process of expanding our team and recently hired Alex Malinovich. Do stay tuned as we’ll be posting important announcements about changes to our Rails hosting services in the next few weeks. (grin)
Boxcar: Open for business 1
We’ve been quietly rolling out our new Rails hosting solution over the past month, each week… inviting more people to ask questions and place orders. Initially, we invited some of our business hosting customers, and then sent out invites to those who signed up on the Rails Boxcar announcement list. We’ve been taking orders for the past few weeks and have had sites running on Boxcar for over a month now.
You’ll also notice that we’ve begun to phase out all of our older shared hosting solutions for new customers and are focusing solely on our Business and Boxcar accounts (aside from custom managed/dedicated solutions that we’ve been offering upon request).
To learn more about Rails Boxcar, read the announcement on the PLANET ARGON blog.
In other news, Daniel Johnson, our Lead Systems Administrator broke his arm while riding his bike while participating in Zoo Bomb (and cracked his helmet in the process). He’s at home today on pain medicine and we hope that he has a swift recovery.
RubyURL: new design and code base 1
Yesterday evening, I deployed the new version of RubyURL. This was a collaborative effort between Chris Griffin and I, which we’re happy to finally push live.
There are a few things that we’re going to push out in near future, such as an API and a new RubyGem.
Chris volunteered to work on the new design and I did most of the programming in Ruby on Rails. When we worked on this, we really wanted to keep the process as simple as possible, despite some of the problems that the site has been having.
In the end, we have a Rails application that is only 85 lines of code and has a 1:2.3 code-to-spec ratio. I wanted to keep it under 100 lines of code. This means that there is some breathing room for further development.
We also tried out a beta account that I was given for RoundHaus for Subversion hosting. We had a really good experience using their service and were impressed by the plethora of useful features that came with the repository, such as continuous integration, rcov/code coverage stats, and twitter integration!.
If you find a bug, be sure to submit a ticket on the RubyURL bug tracker.
On a side note, we deployed this on a brand new Rails Boxcar, our new hosting solution that will be launched in the very near future. ;-)
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