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410 CHAPTER 14 Deployment
This means your web server is now working seamlessly with your application and
everything’s almost ready. If the operating system of the server restarts, however, this
nginx process will not. To fix this small problem, you need to create an init script.
14.6.2 An init script
An init script is a script that is run on startup (init) of the operating system and is usually
used for launching applications or running commands. In Ubuntu, they reside in
the /etc/init.d directory. Here, you’re going to use one to start nginx. This script has
already been prepared for you, and you can download it using this command:
sudo wget http://bit.ly/nginx-init-script -O /etc/init.d/nginx
This command will download the nginx init script and place it at /etc/init.d/nginx.
This file won’t automatically run on boot unless you tell Ubuntu it should, which you
can do with these following commands:
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/nginx
sudo /usr/sbin/update-rc.d -f nginx defaults
If you were to reboot your operating system right now, nginx would start automatically
along with it. You don’t need to do it now, but it’s good to know that it’ll start nginx
when the server boots.
There you have it: the application is deployed onto your Ubuntu server using Capistrano
and is running through the power of nginx and Passenger.
14.7 Summary
In this chapter we covered one of the many different permutations you can use to
deploy a Rails application to a server. This chapter covered the most commonly used
software packages such as RVM, Capistrano, PostgreSQL, nginx, and Passenger, and
therefore it should be a great starting ground for anybody learning about deployment.
There are plenty of other tools out there such as Puppet, 31 Chef, 32 Babushka, 33
and Git Pusshuten. 34 Different people prefer different ways of doing similar things,
and so there’s a wide variety of choice. To cover everything within one chapter is just
not possible.
You set up your server with Ruby 1.9.2 running your Rails 3.0.5 application. You
began by installing the essential packages you needed, then installing RVM, followed
by Ruby.
Afterwards, you set up a user with the same name as your application. This was
shortly followed by the locking down of SSH access on the machine: now nobody is
able to access it with a password, because they need to have the private key instead.
Disabling root access is just generally good practice. Nobody should ever need to use
31 http://puppetlabs.com.
32 http://opscode.com/chef/.
33 http://babushka.me.
34 http://gitpusshuten.com/.