Deploying Ruby on Rails - Is there a good alternative for Heroku?

Question

I'm starting a new small venture, a POC if you would like, and I want to deploy my Rails application for free somewhere. I found that there is Heroku, are there another options?

Answer 1

Yes there are

This is a very good post I found on the subject

http://blog.sudobits.com/2013/02/15/heroku-alternatives-for-deploying-rails-applications

I went over the options there one by one and, to my humble opinion, OpenShift is the best option for a small-medium website, at least for the beginning of developing and creating a POC\Prototype

Why is it better?

• It gives you what Heroku will give you
• It give you local (persistant) storage - So you don't need to pay for S3 on Amazon or equivalent - I guess that in some point you would like to do that (to use S3), but at least for the begining you don't need to put money on it
• It seems that the website is running faster
• I find it more flexible in terms of controlling what is happening on the machine

Are there any disadvantages?

• The only disadvantage I could find on Openshift is that it seems that the deployment takes much more time then on Heroku and there is considerable delay on the first time you address the website (But after the first time is working faster - Not related to browser caching if you think this is the issue)

It might be that the Gemfile section under this document https://www.openshift.com/blogs/converting-an-existing-rails-app-to-run-on-openshift can solve this issue...I will try it later

What are the steps I need to do in order to deploy my already existing application on Openshift?

In many places I found explanations about how to create and deploy new application, but it was a little bit hard to understand how to put my already existing application on OpenShift

This is the reason I want to explain that

Assumptions - Your application is git controlled already - Its path is /home/dev/MyApp - you are now under /home/dev

1. Create Openshift account on https://www.openshift.com
2. Use the command line tools, I found them much more informative
3. Go to https://www.openshift.com/get-started
4. Follow steps 1..3 in order to install and setup the command line tools
5. cd to your rails application folder /home/dev/MyApp
6. Create a new application domain - Run : rhc domain-create <domain name>

7. Create your application in OpenShift by running

   rhc app-create -a MyApp -t ruby-1.9 --no-git

   -a sets the application name under OpenShift - It can be something totally different from your rails application name

   -t sets the application type - I think that for now ruby 1.9 is their highest supported version

   --no-git tells not to create git - Because we already got one

8. Setup your DB

   • Install the appropriate DB cartridge for your OpenShift application by calling

     rhc cartridge add <DB cartridge type> -a <Application Name>

     For example :

     rhc cartridge add mysql-5.1 -a MyApp

     It also supports MongoDB and PostgreSQL

     (see here https://www.openshift.com/developers/technologies)

   • Change your database.yml to relate to the OpenShift database - Now, that is very easy since OpenShift got a lot of its configuration as environment variables and you can simply use it wherever you need - For example :

   production:
     adapter: mysql
     encoding: utf8
     database: <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_APP_NAME']%>
     pool: 5
     host: <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_HOST']%>
     port: <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_PORT']%>
     username: <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_USERNAME']%>
     password: <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_PASSWORD']%>
     socket: <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_SOCKET']%>
   

9. Make sure everything is working locally

   • Run : 'bundle install'
   • Run : 'rails s' - See that everything is OK

10. Git - Add the OpenShift repository as one of your remote repositories and push it

    • Make sure all your work is updated , commited and syncronized with your GitHub - This can save a lot of headach later
    • Run : rhc app-show <application name> - This will show you all the information about your application - Copy the Git URL
    • Run : git remote add openshift <OpenShift repo URL>

    • Take whatever OpenShift is adding by merging

      Run : git merge openshift/master -s recursive -X ours

    • Commit the changes : git commit -am 'adding OpenShift files

    • Push to OpenShift : git push openshift

That is all , now your application should be deployed on OpenShift

How do I open my deployed web site?

Using the rhc app-show <application name> command you can see your website url

It will usually be http://<application name>-<domain name>.rhcloud.com

It is quite easy to change it to your own domain

• Just run rhc alias add <app name> <your domain>
• Then in your DNS management - Edit the CNAME 'www' definition to point to http://<application name>-<domain name>.rhcloud.com

How do I connect to my OpenShift machine?

Again , using rhc app-show <application name> you can see the SSH address Simply run ssh <SSH address> in order to connect

How do I run the migrate and seed automatically upon deployment?

One nice thing in OpenShift is the ability to add custom actions (action-hooks) that are being triggered in different stages of the deployment

You can read more about it here https://www.openshift.com/developers/deploying-and-building-applications

For now, I will only talk about the deploy action-hook

1. Under your application folder go to .openshift/action_hooks and create a file named deploy under it
2. Make this file executable - Run : chmod +x deploy

3. Put some code into it

   For example:

   #!/bin/bash

   echo "Starting deploy"

   pushd ${OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR} > /dev/null

   echo "Change directory to ${OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR}public"

   cd ${OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR}

   cd public

   echo "Creating soft link to ${OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR}uploads named uploads"

   ln -s ${OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR}uploads uploads

   echo "Running bundle exec rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production"

   bundle exec rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV="production"

   echo "Running bundle exec rake db:seed RAILS_ENV=production"

   bundle exec rake db:seed RAILS_ENV="production"

   popd > /dev/null

   • The soft link will be explained later - it is needed for the routing to find the Carrierwave uploaded files
4. Add the file to your git - git add deploy (from inside the folder of course)
5. Commit your changes and push to openshift remote

How can I integrate Carrierwave so I could upload files and save on OpenShift?

There are two points

1. Where will the files be saved ? - This is easy
2. Will the routing know how to fetch my uploaded files ?

Setting the saving path:

Set the initializers\carrierwave.rb file to be

CarrierWave.configure do |config|
  if Rails.env.production?
    config.storage = :file
    config.enable_processing = true
    config.root = ENV['OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR']
    config.cache_dir = config.root + 'uploads'
  end    
end

leave the uploaders as they are by default, meaning storage :file

and

def store_dir

"uploads/#{model.class.to_s.underscore}/#{mounted_as}/#{model.id}"

end

The use of the $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR folder will make sure we will be able to write the files and that it will stay there

Making sure the routing will find the files:

It took me a while to come up with that trick (not too much, just a couple of hours)

Rails routing knows how to relate only the the folders that are under the application folder - soo, on OpenShift machine, it will look for the uploaded files folder (named uploads in our case) under the ${OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR}\public folder , this is where the soft link I put in the deploy file is becoming handy - It simply cheats the system and making it to go and fetch those file from a folder which is not under the application folder

---

I know there are a lot of posts about those issues and how to deploy and everything, but I just wanted to put some order into it.

Of course there might be mistakes and inaccuracies in what I wrote since I didn't documented every step of the way but just from what I remember, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong in some details.

One of the best sourced is the OpenShift documentation

I hope those things will help people and save you time and money

Enjoy