bgror

You're An Idiot For Not Using Heroku »

Created at: 08.11.2009 19:17, source: RailsTips - Home, tagged: heroku hosting mongodb mongohq

In which I discuss my first experience with Heroku and my second. And how awesome it is.

It is true. You are. Go try it now. That is an order. I can wait for you to come back and finish reading this post. I could end the post now, but I suppose I’ll go on and tell you a bit about my experience with Heroku yesterday.

Formerly a Toy in the Cloud

Wynn and I were talking yesterday about how, back in the day, Heroku seemed like a toy in the cloud. They had a rich code editor and you could magically create and deploy applications that sometimes worked. It was neat, but nothing you would use for anything serious.

A toy they are no more. So what is Heroku? According to their site, Heroku is “fast, frictionless, and maintenance free.” After giving it another look yesterday, I would have to agree.

The App

I have a tiny note application that my wife and I use. I use it to mark things to read later and save plain text notes. She uses it to keep track of recipes, tagged with ingredients and whether or not she has made the recipe before. It is nothing fancy, but it serves a purpose for both of us.

The app formerly ran on Dreamhost (how to deploy rails on DH) and used MySQL. Since I decided not to attend the Notre Dame game yesterday, I had some free time, so I watched football on TV all day and worked on converting this project from MySQL to MongoDB (which is awesome).

Once I finished the conversion, which didn’t take long, I exported the MySQL database as XML using PHPMyAdmin (shutter) and then wrote an import rake task that reconnected the xml in MongoDB (which is awesome).

MongoHQ

I have had a MongoHQ invite for a while now, but hadn’t kicked the tired so I decided now was as good a time as any. Then it occurred to me. Why use Dreamhost when Heroku has a free account and I’m already hosting my database in the sky? Why not go cloud to the max and see how things end up?

Heroku

I logged in with my old Heroku account and did some reading through their amazing docs.

• I gem installed heroku.
• heroku created my app using the command line tool.
• git pushed to heroku remote.

Boom. In less than a minute my app was created and deployed on Heroku. Impressive. Now that isn’t where the story ended. Hosting on Heroku is a bit different.

Config Vars

The first thing I ran into was some config file issues. I found Heroku’s article on config vars and switched my app to work like that. git push and my app was deployed again.

Gems

Now I was missing gems. Back to the docs I went, this time to read about managing gems. I created my .gems manifest and git pushed again. Just like that my app was up and running in the sky.

Conclusion

I made a few more changes to my app over the next few hours and deployed after each one with a simple git push heroku master. Each time, I almost giggled as the normal git messages happened and then out of nowhere, Heroku stepped in and informed me that it was deploying my app and…wait for it…wait for it…that the deploy was finished.

Now that I’ve used it for a tiny app, I’m curious to see what it can do with something larger. I’ll definitely be using Heroku a lot in the future, that much I know for sure. Combined with a hosted MongoDB service, it is absolute glory. MongoDB having their GridFS file store, means that not having write access to a file system on Heroku is no big deal. You don’t even have to setup S3.

I’ll leave you with my tweet from yesterday, summing up my experience.

Created and deployed a MongoDB backed Rails app to Heroku and MongoHQ today. I have witnessed the future.

Anyone else out there using Heroku? What kind of apps have you deployed on it? What have your experiences been? Curious to hear from others.

You're An Idiot For Not Using Heroku »

Created at: 08.11.2009 19:17, source: RailsTips - Home, tagged: mongodb mongohq hosting heroku

It is true. You are. Go try it now. That is an order. I can wait for you to come back and finish reading this post. I could end the post now, but I suppose I’ll go on and tell you a bit about my experience with Heroku yesterday.

Formerly a Toy in the Cloud

Wynn and I were talking yesterday about how, back in the day, Heroku seemed like a toy in the cloud. They had a rich code editor and you could magically create and deploy applications that sometimes worked. It was neat, but nothing you would use for anything serious.

A toy they are no more. So what is Heroku? According to their site, Heroku is “fast, frictionless, and maintenance free.” After giving it another look yesterday, I would have to agree.

The App

I have a tiny note application that my wife and I use. I use it to mark things to read later and save plain text notes. She uses it to keep track of recipes, tagged with ingredients and whether or not she has made the recipe before. It is nothing fancy, but it serves a purpose for both of us.

The app formerly ran on Dreamhost (how to deploy rails on DH) and used MySQL. Since I decided not to attend the Notre Dame game yesterday, I had some free time, so I watched football on TV all day and worked on converting this project from MySQL to MongoDB (which is awesome).

Once I finished the conversion, which didn’t take long, I exported the MySQL database as XML using PHPMyAdmin (shutter) and then wrote an import rake task that reconnected the xml in MongoDB (which is awesome).

MongoHQ

I have had a MongoHQ invite for a while now, but hadn’t kicked the tired so I decided now was as good a time as any. Then it occurred to me. Why use Dreamhost when Heroku has a free account and I’m already hosting my database in the sky? Why not go cloud to the max and see how things end up?

Heroku

I logged in with my old Heroku account and did some reading through their amazing docs.

• I gem installed heroku.
• heroku created my app using the command line tool.
• git pushed to heroku remote.

Boom. In less than a minute my app was created and deployed on Heroku. Impressive. Now that isn’t where the story ended. Hosting on Heroku is a bit different.

Config Vars

The first thing I ran into was some config file issues. I found Heroku’s article on config vars and switched my app to work like that. git push and my app was deployed again.

Gems

Now I was missing gems. Back to the docs I went, this time to read about managing gems. I created my .gems manifest and git pushed again. Just like that my app was up and running in the sky.

Conclusion

I made a few more changes to my app over the next few hours and deployed after each one with a simple git push heroku master. Each time, I almost giggled as the normal git messages happened and then out of nowhere, Heroku stepped in and informed me that it was deploying my app and…wait for it…wait for it…that the deploy was finished.

Now that I’ve used it for a tiny app, I’m curious to see what it can do with something larger. I’ll definitely be using Heroku a lot in the future, that much I know for sure. Combined with a hosted MongoDB service, it is absolute glory. MongoDB having their GridFS file store, means that not having write access to a file system on Heroku is no big deal. You don’t even have to setup S3.

I’ll leave you with my tweet from yesterday, summing up my experience.

Created and deployed a MongoDB backed Rails app to Heroku and MongoHQ today. I have witnessed the future.

Anyone else out there using Heroku? What kind of apps have you deployed on it? What have your experiences been? Curious to hear from others.

Ch-ch-ch-changes at Planet Argon »

Created at: 13.08.2009 02:31, source: Robby on Rails, tagged: Business Ruby on Rails ruby PLANET ARGON rails boxcar planet argon Business blue box group hosting rubyonrails announcement

Now that the cat is out of the bag, I can share some recent news with you. Earlier today, we announced that Blue Box Group had acquired Rails Boxcar, our kickass deployment solution for Ruby on Rails applications.

Our team has been offering hosting services for over six years. When I made the decision to start providing Rails hosting over four years ago, it was something that I thought the community needed to validate that Ruby on Rails was a viable solution for building web applications. At the time, there was only one or two companies offering pre-configured solutions. The good ole days. :-)

Over the course of the past 4+ years, we’ve helped deploy and host well over a thousand web applications built with Ruby on Rails. Perhaps we even hosted your site at one point or another. We definitely had a lot of fun and learned a lot from our experience.

Fast-forward four years, the community now has several great solutions and options for hosting their Ruby on Rails applications. Knowing this, we began to look over the plethora of services that we offer and felt that we had been spreading ourselves too thinly. We were faced with the big question of: Should we focus our energy on trying to innovate in this competitive space or should we find a community-respected vendor to pass the torch to?

Rails Boxcar is a product that we are extremely proud of and believe the acquisition by Blue Box Group will be great for our existing customers. The acquisition is going to benefit our customers as they’ll be able to interface with a team with more resources. A team that also aims to innovate in this space and believes that Rails Boxcar will help them do that.

As a byproduct of this deal, our team has an opportunity to focus our collective energy on designing and developing web applications, which has also been a central part of what we do for as long as we’ve been in business. We plan to speed up our efforts on a handful web-based products that we’ve been internally developing and hope to release in the near future.

I had the pleasure of getting to talk thoroughly with the team at Blue Box Group and really feel like they’ll be able to focus their energy on maintaining and innovating within the Ruby on Rails hosting world.. definitely more than we could over the coming years. In the end, the acquisition is going to benefit our customers the most as they’ll be able to interface with a larger team that is innovating in this space.

If you’re interested in learning more about the acquisition, please read the press release.

From our perspective, this is a win-win-win situation for everyone involved. Expect to see some more news from us in the near future… and if you’re looking for a design and development team, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

Slides from my Rails Underground 2009 talk »

Created at: 24.07.2009 18:37, source: Robby on Rails, tagged: Business Ruby on Rails PLANET ARGON hosting rubyonrails agile conference deployment london talk feedback seo railsunder presentation analytics sem

Hello from London!

Am currently enjoying the talks at Rails Underground 2009 in London and had the pleasure to be one of the first speakers at the conference. My talk covered a collection of what our team considers best practices. Best practices that aid in the successful launch of a web application and covered a few Rails-specific topics as well.

I’ll be sharing some posts in the coming week(s) that’ll expand on some of these topics as promised to the audience.

Since I covered a wide range of topics, I decided to share my slides online. They won’t provide as much context (as I’m not speaking as you’ll look at them), but they might hint at some of the topics that I covered. There was a guy video taping the talks… so I assume that a video of my talk will be posted online in the near future.

Until then… here are the slides

82,520 minutes on Phusion Passenger »

Created at: 10.04.2009 13:10, source: Robby on Rails, tagged: Ruby on Rails ruby programming PLANET ARGON passenger mongrel development osx rubyonrails rails railsboxcar hosting deployment

It’s been over 83,520 minutes since I made the switch from using mongrel as my development environment web server to Phusion Passenger. I’ve been extremely impressed with it. Our team has all switched over and haven’t really hit any obstacles in the transition.

Since some people asked me to let them know how this trial period worked out, I felt it was my duty to encourage you all to try it. You can check out my previous post, Switch to Passenger (mod_rails) in development on OSX in less than 7 minutes or your money back! to get rolling.

Additionally, if you’re looking for a streamlined Ruby on Rails deployment environment that includes Passenger, check out Rails Boxcar.