Production-ready. Now what?

Learn the secrets of Rails deployment and everything it takes to successfully run your application in the wild.

Skip the talk — Get it!

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

— Every Rails developer before their first release —

Your Rails application is the heart of your business. Built with the 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 rolling 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.

— Every Rails developer during their first release attempt —

Picture 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 scattered around the web — plus a dedicated workflow to turn this information into a blueprint to apply to any bare naked machine:

Your 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.

— Me, promising —

The problem is gathering all the necessary knowledge, most of which is buried inside of half-assed blog posts and outdated tutorials. Finding and evaluating this information is demoralizing and 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 a few years ago there has not been a single resource providing you with distilled information on how to efficiently build your environment this way.

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

More than 19 years of Rails operations experience squashed into a book

Efficient Rails DevOps is the result of more than 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.

This third edition of Efficient Rails DevOps is a complete rewrite of the already refined second edition, teaching the process that has served me perfectly as long as I can think of in powering every Ruby-based web application I built in the last 19 years.

It incorporates valuable feedback from readers as well as recent changes and additions to the Rails world and covers (among other things):

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

Along the way, you'll demystify the inner workings of a Rails server. Knowing exactly what needs to be done makes switching technologies easy — every hosting approach builds on this knowledge after all (no matter if it involves a physical server, a virtual machine, or a container).

You'll free up precious time to concentrate on building awesome products for your customers instead of constantly struggling with deceptive error messages or unexplainable HTTP 500s.

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 will forever change your view on Rails operations.

This is what people who already read it think:

Thomas Fuchs
Rails Core Alumni, Noko, Pep

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.

Gabriel Fortuna

This book was instrumental in helping our company effectively use Ansible to automate and orchestrate all our client's infrastructure. It's an invaluable resource, and has paid dividends many times over.

Unreservedly recommended!

Wayne Hiner

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.

Gergana Dimova
Marketing wizard

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.

Don Schrimsher
Nooma Technologies, LLC.

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.

Fritz Meissner
@fritzmeissner

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 comes in 2 editions

Complete edition

$ 6999.-
  • The book
    217 pages, DRM-free PDF. Carefully handcrafted, including a working table of contents and navigatable outline.
  • Free updates
    Minor and major updates for life.
  • Code repository
    Dedicated commits for each chapter — as starting point or to track your progress.

Book only

$ 4999.-
  • The book
    217 pages, DRM-free PDF. Carefully handcrafted, including a working table of contents and navigatable outline.
  • Free updates
    Minor and major updates for life.

Enter your discount code here.

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Already bought the book and want to re-download it?

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 is enough to work through the book.

When you should grab a copy:

  • You want to know exactly which 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 more than the book's price on one month of hosting a single app with a PaaS.

Frequently asked questions

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

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About the author

My name is Michael Trojanek and I have been building Rails applications as well as managing Linux servers in my dayjob for 21 years.

I maintain a mailing list with hundreds of members receiving content on Rails DevOps and Bootstrapping and I am a most-viewed writer on Quora.

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