I signed up for a slice on Slicehost a little while ago (there’s quite a waiting list, which is a good sign).
I’m planning on moving some stuff from a local provider to Slicehost, but wanted to experiment first.My current host is a CPanel VPS and it’s proved a little challenging to get that configured for Rails - CPanel doesn’t provide great support out-of-the-box, so it’s all manual, but with the added complexity fo having to work with CPanel’s configuration. I’ve only been able to get a single Mongrel instance running, because CPanel doesn’t support Apache 2.2.x.
System Administration is definitely the weakest part of my skill set - I have always been focussed on the code, and have had the advantage of working with dedicated sys admins - so configuring a VPS from scrach is a little daunting.
Enter Capistrano and Deprec to the rescue.
These tools automate the installation of your Rails stack and deployment of your applciation from Subversion (or GIT, or whatever is hot this week).
The basic steps:
cap setup_admin_account_as_root
cap setup_ssh_keys
cap install_rails_stack
cap deprec_setup
cap deploy_with_migrations
cap restart_apache
And that’s it, you’re done …
You bneed to create a deploy.rb file with your Apache and Mongrel configuration details and Cap will work the rest out.
It’s pretty incredible.
Slicehost has some detailed instructions for configuring Configuring Rails on Ubuntu using Capistrano and Deprec. The instructions pretty much worked out of the box for me.