Efficient Rails DevOps

Your Rails application is the heart of your business. Built with great care, using best practices and being tested extensively. You trust your codebase and you are ready for release.

But before even thinking about how to tackle boring day-to-day sysadmin tasks, you have to assemble your stack from a wealth of options — in a way that allows you to rebuild your server or add new ones when you need them.

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:

They make you worry about data integrity. With new leaks being exploited every other day, having your valuable customer data lying on someone else's server does not contribute to peaceful sleep. Neither does having to wait for someone else to apply the latest patch to a system library.
They limit your choice of technologies — while using a Sinatra backend for your API may be possible depending on your provider, you're doomed if you want to use an exotic database or if your favourite tool for visitor tracking is written in PHP.
They get expensive once your application needs more database rows, background jobs or connections to third party services.
They decrease your value as a developer because they weaken your skills by completely shielding you from operations — a topic serious developers must not neglect.

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.

Moving to production destroys the momentum of your agile workflow.

Now imagine yourself having all this information at hand, liberated by not having to hunt down every small drip of wisdom:

You spin up a Rails server in minutes.
Setting up and configuring a Rails server requires a lot of steps, but you only have to worry about them once (when you build your server's blueprint which will make provisioning of every future machine a no-brainer — be it in your staging or production environment).
You deploy your app with a single command.
Worry-free deployments mean that you can push new releases as soon as they are ready. Not having to rely on some highly opinionated deployment tool means that you can tweak each of your applications' deployment process to be most efficient.
You gain freedom no tool can give you.
Rails is based on Rack — and so are many other great web frameworks. Why not use your knowledge to host and deploy your Sinatra/Camping/Lotus apps the same way?

You application development reaches a whole new level:

There is no longer a difference between running your app locally and serving it to your customers.

The problem is gaining all the necessary knowledge, most of which is hidden inside of half-assed blog posts and outdated tutorials. Gathering 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, there is not a single resource providing you with distilled information on how to efficiently build your environment in such a way.

Until now.

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 what I believe is the most efficient approach to serving Rails applications for Bootstrappers and Small Businesses.

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 second edition of Efficient Rails DevOps adds a lot of refinements to the process and incorporates valuable feedback from readers of the initial release.

After making it through its 165 pages, you will know how to …

… provision a Rails server in a repeatable way
Setup a battle-tested Rails stack (rbenv, nginx, Unicorn and MariaDB/MySQL) on CentOS 7 or 6 using Ansible. Gain the knowledge to swap out any component to suit your needs.
… secure your machine
Protect your production box against the evil in this world by applying best practices to your firewall, webserver, file permissions and SELinux. Serve your application encrypted using an SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt at no additional cost.
… deploy your application
Master the steps needed to cold deploy your app and push new releases in a matter of seconds, with a single command.

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 messing with new error messages.

What readers are saying

Two 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.

Gergana Dimova
Marketing wizard, sansmagi.cc

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.

Don Schrimsher
Nooma Technologies, LLC.

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.

Wayne Hiner
Powerful SHIFTS

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.

Fritz Meissner
@fritzmeissner

Is this book for me?

Efficient Rails DevOps is targeted at Rails developers of any level, as long as they want to release their applications on their own server.

Grab a copy if you …

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

Leave quickly if you …

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

Frequently asked questions

Is this book up-to-date?
Absolutely. The latest version has been released on April 8th 2016 and I am currently working on version 3 which will be a major update (it is scheduled to be released in the second half of 2017).
Which formats are supported?
The book comes as DRM-free PDF. I have no plans for other formats (.epub, .mobi and friends) at the moment — you are encouraged to do quite some copying and pasting so these would be impractical. No dead-tree version either.
Why does the book not support my favourite webserver/database/application server?
While the next version of the book will allow you to swap out some equally popular components (Ubuntu for CentOS, PostgreSQL for MariaDB) I try to limit other choices to a minimum and instead enable you to get the most out of the described stack, which is unrivaled in terms of efficiency.

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

10 years of Rails operations experience squashed into a book

What readers are saying

Is this book for me?

Frequently asked questions

About the author