1. Introduction

Greetings!

This is a quickstart book designed to guide you through the steps to get an automated deploy to a VPS. The book is geared towards Rails beginners who have never deployed before and would like some hand holding. The first part proceeds step by step to build a working Rails deploy. The second part details how to deploy automatically. If you already have deployed Rails you can skip to the Automation part.

Also…

I call this book a ‘Bluebook’ because I noticed that a few of the instructions for setting up Rails would break within a year.1 According to Wikipedia, a Bluebook is like an Almanac. It contains changing facts and data, which seems to be like server setup instructions. My goal with this book, is to produce a new guide every year, updated to the latest Rails stack. Even in the draft stage, this book has proven to be an excellent little quick reference while I was researching the automation scripts. I hope you find it as useful as I have.

Text in this format are commands to be executed on the local machine or the server.

echo "Hello, world!"

Blocks of code with a filepath are usually are meant to be copied to the computer. Links to github are avaiable for you to copy and paste.

https://gist.github.com/jbwyatt4/7115255

foo/bar/hello.rb
1 print "Hello, world!"

I will do my best to keep this book up to date with working instructions for the current stack until Dec 1 2014 (or when a new edition is released). I hope this gives you an incentive to pay for it. A few bucks, hopefully is a small price to pay for the hours you would save going through different forums/tutorials/references looking for answers. Please email me if the instructions do not work out for you and you are using the correct stack that I cover.

Cover art done by Ernesto Mora.

You can purchase this book at:

Leanpub (PDF, mobi, epub)

https://leanpub.com/deployrailsbluebook

Amazon (Kindle)

http://www.amazon.com/Deploy-Rails-BlueBook-2014-Edition-ebook/dp/B00GZ9SNKY

Smashwords (iPad, Nook, Kobo, Oyster, etc)

Coming Soon

Thankyou for reading this book!

  1. This book already expects you to be able to code a basic Rails app. That means you have read Micheal Hartz’s excellent Rails Tutorial at the very least.