Deploying Ruby on Rails with Dreamhost

It can be a very frustrating ordeal deploying a ruby on rails app on dreamhost as I found out when I tried doing it myself.  Here are some of the things I learnt that might make deploying your own rails app slightly less painful.First off I am a complete beginner when it comes to all this Ruby on Rails stuff, so if I can make a simple blog with it, it’s more than likely that you can do something similar.

The hardest part I found was getting everything working on the dreamhost servers. After doing a bit of searching I found this guide on railshosting.org. I tried it but I couldn’t get it to work so I sent them a email (the address is near the bottom of the tutorial) and got a swift reply. After trying the suggestions I still couldn’t get it working, just kept on getting “Rails application failed to start …”, so I decided to delete everything and try again, and that time round it worked.

The second time I tried getting a Ruby on Rails app working on dreamhost It refused to work however many times I tried. So off I went to google and came across “6 tips for deploying Ruby on Rails with Dreamhost” which had one bit of advice I hadn’t seen before which said to “Avoid using a sub-directory for your rails application if ever possible”.

So this time I followed the railshosting tutorial but made the rails app in the folder the website files go in (in my case it was a folder called bobdogz.com) and it worked first time.

Hope this helps someone out there trying to deploy to dreamhost, it can be a very frustrating ordeal if my experience of it is anything to go by.

Posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 by David