Question

I have been testing an app and have all of the functionality worked out. Being my first go with ror I have a few questions about my next step; grateful for direction on this.

Should I do all of the design and UI before putting my app online, or after?

In trying to research this I have found three things that keep coming up as great tools to help deploy – Heroku, Capistrano, and Phusion Passenger. I know Heroku let’s you deploy quickly and easily, but is this the option if I want my app at it’s own URL? I currently host other websites (WordPress) at Hostmonster, but they aren’t supporting Rails 3 yet.

What is the difference between the functionality of Passenger and Capistrano? I have been searching, but not knowing some of the terminology, I’m not sure how to decipher all of it.

Answer 1

Go with Heroku — there’s no need to clutter your brain with all of the hosting stuff since you don’t already know it. Heroku is great, and you can easily have your own domain name. Point your nameservers to a.ns.zerigo.net and b.ns.zerigo.net and run…

heroku addons:add zerigo_dns
heroku domains:add example.com
heroku domains:add www.example.com

Set your domain’s DNS servers to a.ns.zerigo.net and b.ns.zerigo.net.

And done deal, you’re ready to deploy on Heroku. Your first dyno (app instance) is free, Zerigo’s basic dns is free. You’re rolling with 2TB/bandwidth (soft limit) and a whole lotta request-serving for a grand total of $0 and 15 minutes.

And for deployment, from start to finish here (provided you develop within the limitations of Heroku’s platform [ie. read-only filesystem, PostgreSQL, bundler-dependent]):

heroku create yourapp
git push heroku master
heroku open  # opens yourapp.herokuapp.com in your default browser

If you need to configure your DNS records:

heroku addons:open zerigo_dns

It’s like magic, but it’s all just solid engineering.

And to be clear, I don’t work for Heroku.