Eric Roberts and Jesse McGinnis presented 2 different options for deploying a Rails project at the KWRuby meeting on April 19th 2016.

Eric Roberts: Heroku

• Eric's advice is to just use Heroku when starting a new project
• it is cheap, easy and allows you to ignore the deployment details on new project
• Heroku deploys with a git push
• recently added support for doing deployments from PR into staging environments
• the free tier now limits server to running 13 hours/day
  • this eliminates a previous hack of keeping a server running by pinging it regularly
  • still more than enough for most purposes

Jesse McGinnis: Deploy Rails with Ansible

• Jesse has recently been using Ansible for doing server setup and deployments
• integration with Vagrant for local development, but the configuration can get quirky as it gets complicated
• Boltmade has been using it for VM setup and deploys
• Ansible also includes an inventory system
  • handle dynamic and environment based configurations
  • Jesse has not needed to use it, so far
• Ansible galaxy roles <=> Ruby gems
• Jessie finds that there is still a temptation to start a new system with bash
  • the assumption is that THIS system will not get more complicated, but they nearly always do
  • his lesson was to just always use Ansible
  • its not much more complicated than bash to start with, and avoid needing a re-write once it gets too complicated for bash