Manage your logs using Logrotate

You have finally set up your own server and your application using this guide, and you feel proud that your app is now running in the vast web. A few days later, when you accessed your application’s URL, you are greeted with a Server Not Responding error! In panic, you SSH into your server to see what is going on, and soon find out that you have just run out of disk space.

What happened? Continue Reading

Deploying Rails apps using Capistrano

Capistrano Logo Deploying your application to the web is not a one-time thing. There will be changes to the application code, new assets to include, database updates, and so on. Applying these changes to your web server includes a list of commands that we need to do every time we need to deploy.

Capistrano solves this problem by automating the deploy process so you can execute all of the steps in a single command. Automation prevents user errors while deploying like forgetting the precompile task when assets have changed, missing database migrations, and remembering the sequence of commands. Automation also enables your infrastructure to scale so that your code is automatically deployed to all application servers without logging in to each one to manually deploy your code. Continue Reading

Install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu

Ruby_on_Rails-logoAfter you set up your server, its time to deploy applications into it. One of the most popular web application frameworks is Ruby on Rails. This is built using the Ruby programming language and it enables developers to create web applications ranging from quick prototypes and Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) up to large distributed applications. Rails is an opinionated framework, meaning there is a standard way of doing things, but it can also be modified to suit your preferred architecture and coding style. By default however, Rails provides sensible and secure defaults that will help you run and deploy your applications quickly. Through using Ruby gems to augment functionality, you can create a fully-functional web application in a short amount of time.

We will start the process by setting up the dependencies needed for Ruby on Rails. Continue Reading