Category: Web Development

Running Long Tasks and Scripts

As your web application grows, there will be times when you need to run scripts or code snippets that could take quite a while to finish. Examples of these are generating large and complex reports, or updating your database with new values. When there are large numbers of records in your application, these scripts may take hours or even days to finish.

We usually access our application using the SSH protocol to log in and perform tasks in the server remotely. This article describes ways to perform long-running scripts or tasks in your application in order from least effective to most effective. 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