A bit over a year ago, OSU Libraries web development team first started toying with Ruby on Rails. Since that time we have established it as our language of choice for any new project. For me, the switch to Ruby has been absolutely outstanding. For the most part Ruby makes things so much easier. It tends to get out of my way and let me focus on the application I’m trying to write and not the syntax of the language. Heck, even running a local development copy of a web application is easy! In PHP you need to have MAMP (or some other apache installation) set up and configured, point it to the directory, set up a new virtual host….guh! I just want to run my application real quick to check something. In rails it’s as simple as “rails s” on the command line.
But what happens when you want to take that rails application that you wrote on your laptop and push it to a production web server? It turns out that this is an incredibly complex thing. So many options can lead to confusion and complexity. For us, it took a progression from one method to another. I’m by no means saying that our solution is the best or even that it’s finished yet, but maybe our progression will provide some insight for someone else out there.
