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Gem Manifests

Gem installation and management has always been pain when the time comes to deploy an app. Rails 2.1 made good progress in this area with gem dependency specifications, allowing you to vendor required gems with a of set rake commands. That’s the method we’ve been recommending for Heroku apps until now, but it does leave important problems unsolved.

First, a substantial limitation of the vendoring method is that it only works with pure Ruby gems. Many apps depend on gems with native extensions that need to be compiled on the deployment target. It’s no good compiling a…

Deploy Merb, Sinatra, or any Rack App to Heroku

The past eighteen months have seen an explosion of Rails-inspired Ruby web frameworks. Merb and Sinatra are the best known; plus many others such as Ramaze , Camping, and Waves .

That’s why we’re so pleased to announce the ability to deploy any Rack-compatible web app to Heroku.

Assuming you have a Heroku account , here’s how you can deploy a Sinatra app in about 30 seconds. Make a new directory, and inside create hello.rb:

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘sinatra’

get ‘/’ do
“Hello from Sinatra on Heroku!”
end

Then create a config.ru file in the same directory:

…

Deployment That Just Works

Last week I talked a bit about why instant deployment matters . A few people have since commented that it’s not instant deployment that matters to them, but rather deployment that just works every time.

Of course, what we’re really talking about is both. Part of achieving deployment that just works is decreasing complexity and removing steps – each a point of possible failure. We are working toward deployment that’s both instant and completely reliable, because we think those things are tightly linked.

We’ve rolled out some new content today explaining more about how our platform…

Why Instant Deployment Matters

How much better are two steps than three? Does it matter if something takes five minutes instead of twenty? When it comes to software deployment and provisioning, does instant really matter?

Recently, I was ranting on this subject to a user who had the misfortune of asking me about it in person.

“Truly instant provisioning and deployment is the ultimate goal,” I said. “10 seconds isn’t good enough. We have to –”,

“Look,” he interrupted, “I love what you guys are doing and don’t want you to stop, but why are you so obsessed with…

Build a News Site With Rubyflow

Ruby journalist extraordinaire, Peter Cooper, is a busy man. Chances are you’re already following his work to bring you the latest Ruby news on sites such as Ruby Inside and RubyFlow . Late last year he even added a tremendously useful site oriented towards iPhone and iPod Touch development called Mobile Orchard. Somewhere along the line he was also generous enough to leak the source code for Rubyflow, and now a version of that is available through Sutto’s Github repository .That’s great news for anyone looking to start their own news site, especially since it’s a breeze to get…

The Future of Deployment

Application deployment is changing. In relatively short order I’ve gone from buying hardware, to monthly hosting, to metered CPU time, and from building my open-source software manually, to package managers, to fancy config tools and recipes to pre-build whole machine images. What’s next?

The Old Way

I can deploy Rails apps in a traditional hosting environment pretty quickly. For a small app, I might make a new unix user and database on a personal Slicehost slice and do a quick code checkout. After setting up a few permissions and twiddling my Nginx config,…

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