04 Jul 2009

Deploying a rails application to DreamHost

Earlier this week I successfully deployed a rails 2.3.2 application to DreamHost. Deployment is quick and easy if you know what to do.

  1. Enable Phusion Passenger in the DreamHost panel
  2. Point the path to your rails public directory
  3. Freeze rails and your application’s gem dependencies
  4. Restart Passenger with $ touch ~/path/to/rails/app/tmp/restart.txt

On first request it’s slow to load as Passenger launches a Ruby instance. With some page caching, you’ll be able to negate this.

I wouldn’t usually recommend deploying to a shared hosting environment. However, this application was for fun, with a tiny audience and performance is not a constraint.

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Tate Johnson is a 23 year old Ruby on Rails developer and university student living in Brisbane, Australia. He enjoys riding bicycles, motorbikes, taking photos and travelling.