In all of free PAASs, I will personally recommend Appfog because of its web based management interface. Basically AppFog is a polyglot platform powered by Cloud Foundry. The AppFog free plan comes up with 2 GB Ram , 100 MB DB (temporary and it’s increasing) and multiple runtimes. I think, it’s enough for deploying your first pet or side project. Recently, I deployed a RoR (Ruby on Rails) application at AppFog. It’s quite straight forward. So, now I am going to share my experience of deploying the application step by step.
I developed my RoR application in my local/development environment and push it to AppFog by using af gem. Create a free account and setting up RoR application with MySql DB. I set up a RoR application named: rain_test_app. I used MySql here, Because it’s easy and AppFog automatically recognizes MySql.
I had already sai1d that I used the af gem. Basically, af gem is a tool to push source code to Appfog and deploy it. Expecting that you are using rvm, rbenv or others Ruby/Gem management system. So, now open your terminal and install af gem.
gem install af
If your installation is done, then I will show a message as below one..
Successfully installed af-0.3.18.11
So, af gem installation is done. Now, login with Appfog credentials. Open terminal and type..
af login
It will prompt for AppFog username (email address) and password.I went to the application’s (the RoR app that I created in my local/development environment) root and pushed to AppFog. But before pushing it to PAAS, I pre-compiled the assets in my local/development environment. Oh, I forgot to mention that I created my RoR app with the versions of Rails 3.2.3 and Ruby 1.9.3p125. Just to let know that , Rails 3 supports asset pipeline. It compiles them into public assets, so that you can tweak the productionserver later on. So, I needed to Pre-package the app first.
bundle package bundle install
And then, in config/environments/production.rb file, Set it to
config.server_static_assets = true config.assets.compress = true If you use twitter bootstrap in your application, the add follow line as weell config.assets.precompile += %w(bootstrap.min.css)
Pre-compiled the assets.. Ran this command in terminal ..
bundle exec rake assets:precompile
Now, pushed and deployed the app,
af push rain_test_app
In case, it doesn’t work properly. Then you can check and trace the error. Just Run the following command.
af logs rain_test_app --all
Finally, It gave me a message: Push Status: OK. Seems that deploying was done. No it was not done. Still the db migrations were left and I had to do other db configurations. AppFog doesn’t support any direct access to database. So, interactng with your database, You will have to install another gem called caldecott which creates a tunnel that connects a port on your local computer to the service in AppFog. Type following line in terminal..
gem install caldecott
By the tunnel command, I accessed the MySql db and ran all console commands in AppFog. After that, I took the DB credentials from AppFog and then configured the production’s DB environment in my application. First, I checked out that the service was available for me in AppFog.
af services
It will show up all available services and Databases. I chose my one..
af tunnel raintestapp-mysql-16743
It returned the db credentials.
Service connection info:
password : p34rlXo2kDxkW
name : d7fcafced333c42b19aefdb21da29dbb0
infra : ap-aws
I updated the above credentials in database.yml at production environment as below..
production: adapter : mysql2 database : d7fcafced333c42b19aefdb21da29dbb0 username : up9aKxigrR5Am password : p34rlXo2kDxkW port : 10000 host : 127.0.0.1
Saved and updated it to AppFog.
af update rain_test_app
If you deploying is successful and it will give some Okay statuses. You can also access the mysql server by af turnel. Finally, I migrated the db in AppFog. To migrate the db, I ran following comands..
RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production rake db:seed
Yes, my db database is sync with my local one.
It’s done. visit the link provied by AppFog.
It’s nice. I gonna try this very soon. thanks
thanks bhaiya 🙂
this is simply great…. i will try it…
Cool 🙂
Thanks for this, it was very helpful. Where did you run the last 2 commands from though?
RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate
RAILS_ENV=production rake db:seed
In the af turnel.