Deploy Sinatra applications in Dreamhost

Dreamhost is a great hosting, and now that they use Phusion Passenger (mod_rails), we can host Rack based applications, like Sinatra.

Adding the great repository hosting by github, we can have a professional deploying system for our home made projects.

• Create the folder structure:
  

  myapp/
    public/
    tmp/
    views/

• Create your sinatra app, myapp/mywebapp.rb require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' get '/' do 'Hello world' end
• Create the Passenger rackup file, myapp/config.ru require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' Sinatra::Application.default_options.merge!( :views => File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'views'), :run => false, :env => :production ) require 'mywebapp.rb' run Sinatra.application
• In panel.dreamhost.com go to Manage Domains -> Add Domain/Sub Domain.
• Fill the domain/subdomain to host the application, enable mod_rails (Passenger), and add /public to the web directory.
• Install sinatra:

  Connect to your host via SSH

  ssh [email protected]

  gem install sinatra

  This will install sinatra for your user in ~/.gem

Now we could upload via FTP the application to the new domain generated.

If we need to restart the app, just create a restart.txt file in the tmp folder

touch tmp/restart.txt

But we want to use git as repository of the code, and capistrano for the deployment instead of upload manually. This are the steps:

• Go to github.com and create the new repository.
• Go to your project folder initialize git, commit and push to our new repository:
  cd myapp
  git init
  git add .
  git commit -m'first import'
  git remote add origin [email protected]:user/project.git
  git push origin master
• Configure capistrano;
  cd myapp
  mkdir config
  capify .

  Edit config/deploy.rb

  # be sure to change these set :github_user, 'mygithubuser' set :github_application, 'mygithubapp' set :domain, 'mydomain.com' set :user, 'mydreamhostuser' # the rest should be good set :repository, "git@github.com:#{github_user}/#{github_application}.git" set :deploy_to, "/home/#{user}/#{domain}" set :deploy_via, :remote_cache set :scm, 'git' set :branch, 'master' set :git_shallow_clone, 1 set :scm_verbose, true set :use_sudo, false server domain, :app, :web set :keep_releases, 3 after "deploy:update", "deploy:cleanup" namespace :deploy do task :restart do run "touch #{current_path}/tmp/restart.txt" end end
• Be sure that you have empty the domain folder in the server, and setup the capistrano structure:
  cap deploy:setup
• In Dreamhost edit your domain and add /current/public to the web directory.
• Now you can deploy:
  cap deploy
• After this steps, Passenger couldn’t find the sinatra gem again, but was solved installing it again. Weird…

  Now you can also restart the app with:
  cap deploy:restart