I enjoy coding websites. I like coming up with elegant and flexible solutions to problems. If you saw David Heinemeier Hanssons’ early screen casts on web development with Ruby on Rails, you may have been as impressed as I was. Unfortunately, deployment of a website to a *nix server can be a daunting task if you haven’t done it before. It doesn’t matter if it is a PHP, Python, or Ruby on Rails website, you need to have some basic sysadmin skills to set everything up on a newly installed server. You’ve got to know something about web servers (Apache, NginX, etc.), something about databases (MySQL, Postgres), about firewalls (iptables or Shorewall), source control (Subversion), email (SendMail, Postfix), monitoring your server (Monit, Nagios), statistics (Awstats, etc.), log rotation, cron jobs, offsite backups (Amazon s3). I have yet to meet an expert in all of these areas. For those sysadmins out there that fit the description I bow deeply. I’ve decided to do a series on setting up a full Rails stack on Ubuntu. So far I have deployed production Rails web applications to Red Hat, Open Solaris, CentOS, and Ubuntu servers. I’ve learned enough to know how truly ignorant I am. I don’t claim to be an expert. But I am willing to share what I’ve learned so far in hopes it will help others out there. Here is what you’ll get (in no particular order) when finished with the series. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: install, mongrel, monit, nginx, Rails, setup, stack, Ubuntu