Rails Deployment Configuration Book

Posted by ezmobius Fri, 09 Dec 2005 18:31:00 GMT


EDIT: This book has been picked up by the pragmatic programmers. It will be available as a beta book pdf for download in March. Then the final printed version should be available in early summer. Thanks for all the interest and stay tuned for more announcements.


I’m thinking about writing a small sized book on rails development and production environment configuration. Sometimes it seems like every other question on the rails mailing list and on #rubyonrails is about fcgi or server setup or some issue with deploying or installing rails and friends.

I have spent a great deal of my time with rails on getting the configuration of the server and underlying architecture running just right. And it seems that most information about this stuff is spread out over the rails wiki and hundreds of other blogs out there.

I already have quite a bit of this stuff written in my notes and I have written a few detailed tutorials here on my blog as well. But I have started organizing this stuff in a high level overview and have written the first few chapters of this book already.

My question is this: Would you be interested in purchasing a book like this? It will most likely be released as a DRM Free PDF only at first unless I get a publisher interested. I have sent a proposal to the wonderful PragmaticProgrammers.com for me to write one of their Pragmatic Friday PDF’s. I hope they will take me up on it ;-)

I think this is one area of rails development that gets swept to the wayside and doesn’t get nearly enough attention. And the info that is available is fragmented and contradictory at best.

Here is a very preliminary table of contents:

  • Intro to rails environments and overview of what we will cover in the book.
  • Installation of your development environment on all the major platforms(OSX, Linux, BSD, Windows)
  • Practical techniques for development on your own or working with other developers remotely.
  • Migrations
  • Production Environment Theory
  • Apache/FastCGI or SCGI
  • Lighttpd/FastCGI or SCGI
  • Daedalus/Daemon Tools and friends for keeping your servers running no matter what.
  • Switchtower
  • Other Helpful Tools for Your Arsenal.
  • Shared Hosting.
  • VPS or Dedicated Hosting.
  • Stories of Successful Rails Applications Already Running in the Real World.
  • The Impact of Ajax Techniques on Your Server Load
  • Code Snippets and Samples for Accomplishing Things the “Rails Way” and Making Sure You Make Sane Decisions that Will Scale Later.
  • But Can Rails Scale? ;-)
  • Wrapup and Discussion of High Level System Overviews.

    So please leave comments about anything I might be missing that you would like to see in a book like this. And if anyone want to help out and thinks they could write a chapter or two on something they know a lot about I am all ears. And do you folks think this would be a good idea and worth spending a significant amount of my time on?

    Thank you for any suggestions or comments.

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