A Shining Ruby in Production Environments

Fabrizio Soppelsa — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 17:42:31 +0000

Even the most beautiful Rails application can lose its elegance if not deployed correctly. Like other Ruby frameworks or languages, such as Sinatra, Rails is based on the Rack interface. This article provides a basic introduction to Rack hosting and Rack-based application deployments.

When Rails first was released in 2005, developers exulted. Finally, a comprehensive open-source framework for Web applications was available, packed with a set of tools making Web development fast, productive and fun. Rails has the reputation of being a "heaven for developers", but despite the many facilities it provides for avoiding typical and repetitive tasks, there is still a weak spot: deployment. Deploying a Rails application is not a smooth matter. Everyone knows that Rails applications will be published on-line one day, but not precisely how.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Developers often choose to purchase hosting space as Platform as a Service (for example, Heroku, OpenShift or EngineYard). PaaS is marvelous as it provides a ready-to-use environment containing a full stack of software dependencies. Publishing on a PaaS platform is, as a rule, easy, fast and everything tends to work (almost) immediately. But there are at least two cases when PaaS won't fit your needs: when applications must be kept in the customer's private infrastructure or when applications have superior hardware or software requirements—for instance, when you need a specific software service not supported by your PaaS provider.

In such situations, you must implement custom virtual server configurations and custom deployment procedures. You can deploy Rails applications on servers or on virtual machines. The availability of entire cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS), which allow you to create complex infrastructures made of several Web servers, database servers and front-end balancing machines, is hugely growing in popularity. This approach is very flexible, although you must access, install and manage the operating system and the distribution packages, configure the network, activate the services, and so on and so forth. In this article, I describe the Rack-based hosting software requirements and some basic example configurations to implement automated Ruby hosting on a GNU/Linux server.

RVM

First, if you want to host Ruby software, you must install the Ruby platform. You can install Ruby and gems with apt-get or yum. It's easy, but when your application requires specific gem versions or specific interpreter versions, you will face a common problem. How can you satisfy these requests if your GNU/Linux distribution doesn't package those specific versions? Furthermore, how can you maintain multiple Ruby versions in a clean and repeatable manner?

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