Question

I have a 1and1 Linux VPS server and we are not permitted to use third party applications like Github to push our code to the server. I realise that this is silly but nevertheless.

Is it actually possible to get a Rails app running by FTPing it over to a Linux server?

Answer 1

Sure, this is possible. You’d copy all the files over. Only a couple tricky points:

• Setting environmental variables might be difficult
• Depends on what application server 1&1 provides to you. Apache by itself isn’t good enough, you’ll need something to run the Ruby code, like Passenger, Mongrel (old but possibly available), or Unicorn (unlikely).

Also — you have a VPS server, so you probably have SSH access and can use ssh to copy files up, rather than FTP.

Capistratno setup:

set :repository, "."
set :scm, :none
set :deploy_via, :copy