Efficient Rails DevOps

Efficiently provision your Rails stack, deploy your applications and manage your production environment with Ansible.

„Screw it! — Moving my Rails app to production takes more time than developing it!“

Your Rails application is the heart of your business. Built with utmost care, adhering to best practices and tested extensively. You trust your codebase and you can hardly await your first customers.

But before you can lean back and monitor your dashboard for incoming sales, there is an intermediate step you postponed for as long as possible: Moving your application from your development machine into the wild.

You already tried hosting your application with a PaaS like Heroku, EngineYard or Ninefold only to find out that they do not quite cut it for you:

You are on a point where you have outgrown hosting with a PaaS and realize that running your own infrastructure is the way to go.

But there is a wealth of information to digest before you are even able to provision a Rails stack and a lot of questions need to be answered.

„Moving to production defeats Rails' agility in minutes.“

Imagine yourself having all the needed information to spin up a server from the ground up — without needing to hunt down every tiny drip of wisdom — plus a dedicated workflow to turn this information into a blueprint to apply to any bare naked machine:

You application development reaches a whole new level:

„There will no longer be a difference between running your app locally and serving it to your customers.“

The problem is gathering all the necessary knowledge, most of which is burried inside of half-assed blog posts and outdated tutorials. Finding and evaluating this information takes days, weeks or even months of trial-and-error — time you would rather spend on developing awesome products for your customers.

Unfortunately, up until two years ago there has not been a single resource providing you with distilled information on how to efficiently build your environment in such a way.

Then there was. And now it is back in its awesome third edition.

More than 10 years of Rails operations experience squashed into a book

Efficient Rails DevOps is the result of a decade of experience releasing Rails applications and reliably running them in production.

It covers the most efficient approach to serving Rails applications for small businesses, bootstrappers and enthusiasts.

Having served me perfectly as long as I can think of in powering every Ruby-based web application I built in the last 10 years, this third edition of Efficient Rails DevOps is a complete rewrite of the already refined second edition.

It incorporates valuable feedback from readers as well as recent changes and additions to the Rails world.

By building a reusable and versioned playbook you'll be able to seamlessly switch between staging and production environments, enabling you to test out new features of your application in an isolated environment to eliminate the fear of breaking something when pushing to production.

You'll have more time to concentrate on building awesome products for your customers instead of constantly struggling with deceptive error messages.

Don't take my word for it.

I spent years making Efficient Rails DevOps the definitive guide on the subject, so I'm quite biased. Fortunately, you do not have to believe me that this book is worth its price multiple times.

This is what people who already read it think:

Years ago, I spent 2 weeks and literally thousands of dollars of productive time learning by trial and error (many, many errors!) how to automate our server provisioning and Rails application deployment with Ansible.

If Michael had written his book sooner, I could have set up the same automation in an afternoon …

If you’re looking on migrating away from expensive black box PaaS or from wonky shell scripts, get this book.

Thomas Fuchs
Rails Core alumni, Freckle

To me, it's clear that this book will save developers HOURS of time and TONS of frustration, trying to figure out what they did wrong. I especially like how you tackled all security issues and explained why you did what you did. Top that with the fact that this is a bulletproof, foolproof process that's been refined over the course of 10 years and you've got a robust sure-fire method for deploying Rails apps.

This book is a piece of gold and a must-have for anyone doing DevOps. You need to get that into the hands of the people who actually need it.

I loved the book.

It was easy to follow and concise. It helped me greatly in automating some of our infrastructure setup and gave very helpful practical examples of how to use Ansible.

I think it provides a much needed resource for a neglected area of tech.

Thanks for a great book!

I've read it cover-to-cover already. I've been deploying Rails applications for 3 years and I have picked up a bunch of tricks, both large and small, that I hadn't learned on my own.

This is an excellent product.

It's been great for me getting a client off Heroku. It's in such great detail, which is helpful for me as a complete DevOps beginner.

Efficient Rails DevOps is currently sold for $49.99.

Through my free-updates-for-life policy, you will get all future updates of the book for free if you buy now.

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Is this book for me?

Efficient Rails DevOps is not about developing Rails applications (so your Rails developing experience does not matter) — it is about operating them. In this regard, it is cool if you are an absolute DevOps beginner — minimal Linux knowledge really is enough to work through the book.

When you should grab a copy:

  • You want to know exactly what steps are necessary to make a Rails application run on a server.
  • You are fed up with managing your environment with scripts needing your constant attention.
  • You have already wasted too much of your precious time messing around with configuration files, permissions and untraceable errors.

When you should leave quickly:

  • You absolutely loathe Linux and its command line.
  • You are willing to make the final layer between your application and your customers someone else's responsibility.
  • You rather spend the book's price on one month of hosting a single app with a PaaS.

Frequently asked questions

Still not convinced?

Join my email list and I will send you a free sample chapter (including the book's table of contents) which will definitely help you to decide whether this book is for you or not.

If anything else is holding you back, just drop me a line — I'll be happy to answer all your questions.

About the author

My name is Michael Trojanek and I have been building Rails applications in my spare time as well as managing Linux servers in my dayjob for 15 years.

I maintain a mailing list with hundreds of members receiving content on Rails DevOps and Bootstrapping and I have already released other successful books for Rails developers and operators (Build Your Own Rails Server and Developing With Vagrant).

You can follow me on Twitter or learn more about me and my products on my website.