Update: While it’s good to understand what you’re doing, this template file will get you so that after you get your app running, cap deploy:setup and cap deploy:cold works, assuming you have the host set up properly and have your app’s main directory cleared of all files.

Everybody Loves Dreamhost, but…

Dreamhost is a great little hosting company, but it really lags when it comes to keeping the latest software up to date. It’s version of Ruby is 1.8.7 and the latest stable version of Rails they have running is 3.0.3. That release is technically in “security fix” mode. Ugh.

So I’d like to run Rails 3.2, but don’t want to pay for a VPS since this system is going to be small and simple. How can I do it?

As it turns out, it’s relatively easy. I only ran into one headache and was able to install anything I wanted without any problems. How did I do this? The secret, my friends, is bundle pack

Creating a new Vendored App

Let’s create a new Rails 3.2 app and set our local RVM to use 1.8.7 since that’s what passenger uses (and can’t use another version)

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$ rails new myproject -d mysql
...
$ cd myproject
$ echo "rvm use 1.8.7" > .rvmrc
$ cd ../myproject # to engage the new rvmrc
$ echo "gem 'capistrano'" >> Gemfile
$ bundle install
$ bundle package
$ capify .

Deploying via Copy

Now you’ll need to edit your deploy file. It’s easy to deploy via copy:

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require 'bundler/capistrano'

# to get past the 'bundle not installed errors'
set :default_environment, {
  "PATH" => "~/.gems/bin:/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/bin/:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:"
}
set :shell, "/bin/bash"

set :application, "myproject"

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

set :domain, MY_DREAMHOST_DOMAIN
set :user, MY_DREAMHOST_USER
set :deploy_to, "/home/#{user}/#{application}/"
set :use_sudo, false

role :web, domain
role :app, domain
role :db,  domain, :primary => true # This is where Rails migrations will run

# if you want to clean up old releases on each deploy uncomment this:
after "deploy:restart", "deploy:cleanup"

# If you are using Passenger mod_rails uncomment this:
namespace :deploy do
  task :start do ; end
  task :stop do ; end
  task :restart, :roles => :app, :except => { :no_release => true } do
    run "#{try_sudo} touch #{File.join(current_path,'tmp','restart.txt')}"
  end
end

Make sure you set up your config/database.yml to include your production database connection data and let’s do a deploy

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$ cap deploy:setup
$ cap deploy:cold

The Big Gotcha: The Asset Pipeline

Now we need to enable the asset pipeline. First uncomment the line related to it in Capfile

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load 'deploy'
# Uncomment if you are using Rails' asset pipeline
load 'deploy/assets'
load 'config/deploy' # remove this line to skip loading any of the default tasks

… and multiple platform hell.

Then we need to handle the singular headache that is related to the asset pipeline if you’re working on a different platform than Debian linux (say, OS X)

The libv8 gem that is installed and vendored on your local cache is for ‘darwin’, which is not compatible with the linux architecture. I looked to see if I could figure another way around this, but the best way I could find is to ssh in, uncomment gem ‘therubyracer’ and run bundle update && bundle pack on the remote box. Then I copied the libv8-3.3.10.4-x86_64-linux.gem file in vendor/cache down to my local vendor cache and went on my merry way.

After that, you can cap deploy to your hearts content and you’ll have a fully deployed Rails 3.2 app on the shared Dreamhost running through passenger!