Automated Rails Deployments with Jenkins and Capistrano

2014-10-27

Continuous integration and continuous deployment are two important elements of building successful web applications. Frequently merging code together and running automated tests tends to result in a healthier code base and improves the ability and speed in which a development team can release features and fix bugs. And, by automating the deployment process, you can ensure that your team can deploy confidently and quickly. In this post, I am going to summarize a quick way to achieve a simple continuous deployment workflow for a Rails application using Capistrano and Jenkins. …

11 Capistrano Plugins To Simplify Your Rails Deployments

2014-10-12

The Rails deployment story has improved dramatically since the early days, but it can still be challenging. Compiling assets, running migrations, achieving zero-downtime deployments, and load balancing your application servers are some of the tasks that you’ll want to handle as part of your deployment strategy. Many deployment processes still tend to be a mixture of automation and manual work. The goal is to have a fully automated, repeatable and fast deployment process. Sounds simple on paper, but as many of us already know, this process is time consuming, error prone and has the tendency to make you want to rip your hair out or throw your keyboard out the window. …

Book recommendation: PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance

2014-10-09

Lately, I have been working on a reporting system that involves some pretty complex queries against a large data set. I feel like I am reasonably proficient in writing SQL but I’ve always felt like performance tuning queries was a bit of a dark art. Trying to interpret long and cryptic query plans just made my head hurt. I needed something to help demystify this stuff and I found this book: PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance. …

Updating ruby-build to get the latest rubies

2014-10-05

No rocket science here - just because I always forget… If you are using rbenv with the ruby-build plugin and want to upgrade to the latest version of ruby, you might have to update ruby-build to get the latest definitions. …

Ansible Quick Start - A Brief Introduction

2014-09-26

Recently, I have been working with Ansible, an IT automation, configuration management and provisioning tool along the same lines as Chef and Puppet. If you are responsible for managing servers - even if it is just one - you would be well served to learn one of these tools. …

How to Prepare for a Successful Launch

2014-01-22

Launching a new web application can be a nerve-wracking experience. Besides being nervous about how your users are going to respond to your product, you also have to worry about whether the site will stay up and running in the first place. It is important to be well prepared for any issues you may encounter when you unleash your web application to the public for the first time. It can be hard to predict how much (or how little) traffic you are going to get. You don’t want to get paralyzed by fear and doubt and delay your launch while you (prematurely?) optimize everything you can but you also don’t want to end up with a failing application and no plan to get it back up and running quickly. There are certainly some things you can do to prepare for your launch and to handle an unexpected load of traffic. …