I’m deploying a few new rails projects this week. The biggest issue I have with rails projects is the work that goes into setting up local SVN, Capistrano, an SVN server, application server, web server and a database server.

On top of all that you need to setup Capistrano to deploy to them all, and run some testing etc.

Overall it’s a 2-3 day process. But with the help of litespeed, it’s come down; litespeed has cut a good 6hrs out of it all in my opinion. Realistically it takes a lot of time to do it right, and to test it.

Not to mention the long term advantage of running litespeed, - load balancing, scaling and memory management.

Sure if you really wanted to you can get up and running in under an hour.

But to produce a solid development, staging and production environment with the right setup and infrastructure to last more than a month, it takes time.

I think I’ve put together a nice process to handle it all, I’m going to spend the next few days going through the whole process again from scratch, and I’ll be documenting it, so I’ll probably post it.

The setup I use server wise is:

• 1x Local development server (Ubuntu 7)
• 1x hosting account for SVN (I use a media temple grid service account)
• 1x 512mb slice from slice host (dedicated virtual server, saleable up or down at anytime) for the rails application(s)
• 1x 256mb slice from slice host (again, dedicated virtual server saleable at any time) for mysql and phpmyadmin.

The slice server virtual servers are also Ubuntu 7.

And as far as software goes, I’m using the normal subversion, ruby 1.8, and what not.

My main difference, and the main difference with everyone when it comes to ruby apps is webservers, I’m using litespeed.

I’m amazed why more people don’t use it.

Go and read about it. I’ll post more about it later. It really kicks the crap out of apache, and nginx.

It runs php 50% faster than apache. And it runs ruby on rails super fast too, and with less memory used. Far less.