April 2007 Archives

Office pictures

After 3 months we finally got the office in Manila operational. Here are some pictures:

Office Pictures

So far we have hired

Marc Paul (PHP), Karla (ActionScript), Joanne (PHP),

and we are on the verge of hiring:

Raleigh (PHP, RoR), Arnold (senior tester), Michelle (admin assistant), Andrew (senior PHP developer).

Posted by David Beckwith on Apr 28, 2007

My deploy.rb file for my Rails application hosted at RailsPlayground.com

INTRODUCTION

This article is about how to configure Capistrano’s deploy.rb file so that it works on railsplayground.com. I’m assuming that you registered for the Guru plan with a site called “MainRegisteredDomain.com” and you are hosting another site using rails called “YourSite.com” and that you are planning to deploy to the production server. This generalized version of deploy.rb has not been tested (because it’s general—duh!), but it is based on a working version. ~/your_rails_application/config/deploy.rb resides in your local development machine.

Posted by David Beckwith on Apr 25, 2007

To track or not to track: files to remove from SVN while using Capistrano

Background

This article assumes that you know what Subversion(SVN) source control is. I was trying to figure out how to deploy rails applications using Capistrano. I think of Capistrano as a fancy replacement for FTP, but of course it’s much more than that. Capistrano is a deployment tool that acts as a liason between your local development box, your SVN repository, and the web server, and handles all the pesky details for you when you want to deploy to your web server from your code repository. For example, after typing “cap deploy” on your local machine Capistrano will:

• download all the code from your SVN repository into your production server
• log into your remote machines (web server and repository)
• remove files on your production server that you don’t want to have uploaded.
• create symbolic links in your rails deployment to system web server specific copies of the rails file (like dispatch.cgi)
• remove old temporary files or previous deployment files

It is implemented in Ruby and runs on your development machine. Although it was originally developed for deploying RoR applications, you can use it for fancier things like managing your server farm on Amazon’s EC2. My development box was running Rails 1.2.2 and my web server was running Rails 1.2.3 at the time of this writing, and my particular Capistrano configuration makes symbolic links to core rails files to remedy the difference in these two Rails versions. In the discovery process, I realized that some files needed to be removed from SVN. Here is what I came up with. I hope it helps you. I’m using railsplayground.com, shared hosting, dispatch.cgi.

Posted by David Beckwith on Apr 24, 2007