I’m sitting here twiddling my thumbs right now while my application deploys itself.
Rails has completely changed the way I work on the internet. Before I used to manually push individual files up via ftp. I made manual backups of my files using my own proprietary naming schema’s. If there where problems I had to run through a checklist of things I could have done wrong. Sometimes I’d have to go thorough the entire process again to get the darn thing working right.
Up until this last project I even did this with my Rails work. I will never go back!
I’m using a set of tools now including Radrails (my IDE of choice), Subversion (versioning and repository/backup) and Capistrano (Deployment). To deploy I select my updated files in Radrails and commit them to Subversion by right clicking and selecting commit. Once the files have been I go to a console navigate to my project and type “cap deploy”. This kicks of Capistrano and all I have to do now is wait.
Configuring all these tools can be a pain the first couple times, but I only have to go through that process once per project. After that they pretty much deploy themselves. You can even write variable deployment recipe’s for deploying to different test environments.
If this goes over your head, don’t worry. If you need to know it give it some time and exposure. If you don’t have a practical use nod and move on with life. There is a world of magic and mystery here that most lay people should probably remain distanced from.
