Looks like ActiveState is trying to market a new Ruby distribution for Enterprises:

ActiveRuby Enterprise Edition is designed for businesses with large Ruby deployments in essential, mission-critical applications that, when down, could cost your business in lost revenue and a damaged reputation. Deploy Ruby with confidence knowing you're using the most secure, enterprise-grade builds for the platforms that power your business. You'll get priority access to our Ruby experts for technical support and best prac...

We generally use multiple application servers (at least two) and you have to search on all of them if you don't know which one handled the request you are looking for.

Rails application logs usually live in /var/www/<project-environment-name>/shared/log.
Web server logs usually live in /var/www/<project-environment-name>/log.

Searching through single logs with grep / zgrep

You can use grep in this directory to only search the latest logs or zgrep to also search older (already zipped) logs. zgrep is used just like grep ...

On application servers, gems are usually bundled into the project directory, at a location shared across deployments.

This is usually shared/bundle inside your project's root directory, e.g. /var/www/your-project/shared/bundle/.
If you can't find that, take a look at current/.bundle/config and look for BUNDLE_PATH.

When you are changing the version of RubyGems or Bundler on a system where gems are installed this way, you must wipe that bundle directory in addition to the user and system gems or gems that are already ins...

Sometimes huge refactorings or refactoring of core concepts of your application are necessary for being able to meet new requirements or to keep your application maintainable on the long run. Here are some thoughts about how to approach such challenges.

Break it down

Try to break your refactoring down in different parts. Try to make tests green for each part of your refactoring as soon as possible and only move to the next big part if your tests are fixed. It's not a good idea to work for weeks or months and wait for all puzzle pieces ...

TL;DR: Update the 'net-ssh' gem by adding to your Gemfile:

gem 'net-ssh', '=2.9.1'

Now run bundle update net-ssh. It has no dependencies so it shouldn't update other gems.

If you're using Ruby 1.8.7 and want to update net-ssh to a version > 2.9.1 you also need to add this to your gemfile:

gem 'backports', :require => false

... and in your deploy.rb add this:

require 'backports/1.9.2/array/select' 

Background

You propably have an older version of Capistrano and thereby an older version of `n...

• Improve geordi cucumber: Only attempt @solo run when the specified files contain the @solo tag, skip @solo run if any filename is passed with a line number (e.g. features/example.feature:3)
• Improve geordi deploy: Find stages by their prefix (e.g. s -> staging, m -> makandra), bundle if needed, check the selected stage exists
• Improve geordi server: Takes port as argument (e.g. geordi ser 3001), option --public (-P) starts the server with -b 0.0.0.0 to make it accessible from other machines in the local network, e.g. ...

Capistrano is by default configured to exclude the gems of the groups development and test when deploying to the stages production and staging. Whenever you create custom groups in your Gemfile, make sure to exclude these, if they should not be deployed to the servers. The gems of these groups might not be loaded by rails, however, the deployment process will take longer as the gems will be downloaded and installed to the server.

e.g. to exclude the groups cucumber and deploy, add the following to `config/deploy/production.rb...

When building a web application, one is tempted to claim it "done" too early. Make sure you check this list.

Different screen sizes and browsers

Desktops, tablets and mobile devices have all different screen resolutions. Does your design work on each of them?

• Choose which browsers to support. Make sure the page looks OK, is usable and working in these browsers.
• Use @media queries to build a responsive design
  • If you do not suppo...

Tool to show you which gems are slow to load:

➜  git:(master) ✗ bundle exec bumbler
[#################################################                             ]
(49/65) travis-lint...
Slow requires:
    110.21  render_anywhere
    147.33  nokogiri
    173.83  haml
    179.62  sass-rails
    205.04  delayed_job_active_record
    286.76  rails
    289.36  mail
    291.98  capistrano
    326.05  delayed_job
    414.27  pry
    852.13  salesforce_bulk_api

To install gems Bundler needs to be able to talk to https://api.rubygems.org.

If you are behind a proxy you can use the https_proxy environment variable:

https_proxy=http://myproxy:123 bundle install

Note that if there is no https_proxy env variable, Bundler will also look for a http_proxy env variable.

With Capistrano

Ideally the server you're deploying on exports an https_proxy variable for all shells.

If you don't have control over the server setup, you can also add this to your Capistrano config:
...

Changes:

• Geordi is now (partially) tested with Cucumber. Yay!
• geordi cucumber supports a new @solo tag. Scenarios tagged with @solo will be excluded from parallel runs, and run sequentially in a second run
• Support for Capistrano 2 AND 3 (will deploy without :migrations on Capistrano 3)
• Now requires a .firefox-version file to set up a test firefox. By default now uses the system Firefox/a test Chrome/whatever and doesn't print warnings any more.
• geordi deploy --no-migrations (aliased -M): Deploy with `cap ...

Note

The maintenance mode is enabled on all application server as soon as the file /public/system/maintenance.html is present.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

 gem 'capistrano', '~> 3.0'
 gem 'capistrano-maintenance', '~> 1.0'

Add this line to you application's Capfile:

require 'capistrano/maintenance'

Enable task

Present a maintenance page to visitors. Disables your application's web interface by writing a #{maintenance_basename}.html file to each web server. The servers m...

Changes:

• Remove some old binaries (commands still exist in geordi) and mark others as deprecated
• Rewrite deploy command to support most deploy scenarios:
  • master to production
  • feature branch to staging
  • master to staging or production to production (plain deploy)
• Improve Cucumber command (fixes #18):
  • Fix pass-through of unknown options to Cucumber
  • Add --rerun=N option to rerun failed Cucumber tests up to N times. Reboots the test environment between runs, thus will pick up fixes you made durin...

The nokogiri gem provides different packages for several platforms. Each platform-specific variant ships pre-built binaries of libxml2, e.g. x86_64-linux includes binaries for 64bit Linux on Intel/AMD. This significantly speeds up installation of the gem, as Nokogiri no longer needs to compile libxml2.

However, this also means that for each security issue with libxml2, Nokogiri maintainers have to update their pre-built binaries and release a new version of the gem. Then, you need to update and ...

If you'd like to preview the crontab that whenever will deploy, run the following:

bundle exec whenever

This will print the cron syntax without modifying your local crontab.

In Capistrano 2, directories in shared_children used to be symlinked to the shared directory during the finalize_update task.

# <capistrano>/lib/capistrano/recipes/deploy.rb

_cset :shared_children,   %w(public/system log tmp/pids)
# ...
task :finalize_update, :except => { :no_release => true } do
  # ...
  shared_children.map do |d|
    run "ln -s #{shared_path}/#{d.split('/').last} #{latest_release}/#{d}" # <-- symlinks only the last s...

Note: Making a reverse proxy with nginx is much more straightforward.

A reverse proxy is a "man in the middle" server that tunnels requests to another server. You can use for things like:

• Expose a local service that you cannot directly reach over the internet
• "Change" the domain or path of a web application by rewriting them on the fly
• Instantly change servers that respond to a name or ...

Capistrano 3 is a major rework of the framework and requires several adjustments to your deploy configuration files. The biggest change is that they moved away from their custom DSL and use Rake instead. For connecting with and operating on the servers, they bring a new gem SSHKit which does the heavy lifting. It's SSHKit's DSL that is used anywhere inside the Rake tasks. See #Resources at the bottom for examples.

Step 1: Upgrade guide

For migration from 2 to 3, follow this tutorial: [Capistrano 3 Upgrade Guide](https://semaphorec...

You can hook into Slack when using Capistrano for deployment. The slackistrano gem does most of the heavy lifting for you. Its default messages are unobtrusive and can be adjusted easily.

When deploying, it posts to a Slack channel like this:

How to integrate

Integrating Slackistrano with Capistrano 3 is fairly simple.

1. In your Slack, open menu → A...

Geordi 1.0 features a command line application geordi, that holds most of Geordi's previous commands.

New features

• command help and usage examples right within geordi (geordi help and geordi help <command>)

• quick command access: type just the first few letters of a command, e.g. geordi rs or geordi dev[server]

• command dependencies, e.g. geordi rspec invokes geordi bundle-install (which bundles only if needed)

• no cluttered /usr/bin, but all commands in one handy tool

• template for easily adding new...

Rails has always included a scaffold script that generates a default controller implementation for you. Unfortunately that generated controller is unnecessarily verbose.

When we take over Rails projects from other teams, we often find that controllers are the unloved child, where annoying glue code has been paved over and over again, negotiating between request and model using implicit and convoluted protocols.

We prefer a different approach. We believe that among all the classes in a Rails project, controllers are some of the hardest to...