General comments on text and procedures

I have followed the text, in one way or another, through the Puppet chapter using a cygwin installation on a Windows box. Most of the stuff works but I have had to do quite a few work-arounds for pieces that don’t work out of the box – for example, in the passenger init.pp script there is the line:

/usr/local/bin/gem install passenger -v=3.0.15>

My system complains that the gem cannot be installed from the script – so I just installed it manually and went on.

There were several other similar failures to install that I worked around, such as

exec { /usr/local/bin/passenger-install-apache2-module—auto>

that also took a bit of finagling outside of the puppet code.

These were minor annoyances compared with the Capistrano chapter, which starts out with:

for MassiveApp, let’s ensure Capistrano always gets installed by adding it to our Gemfile.

group :development do
gem ‘capistrano’, ‘~> 2.11.2’
end

So, where’s the Gemfile? the Gemfile in my VM? The Gemfile in the sky? The Gemfile that (doesn’t) exist in my cywgin installation? The Gemfile that exists on my mac RVM setup but doesn’t exactly match what’s in the text?

I have put a lot of hours into this process and now feel as if I have hit a wall -and been ripped off.

If I run this on my mac, which is slow as a turtle compared with my Windows box, BTW, it sort-of works but the dependencies still aren’t all resolved and I have to tweak each example. This book needs serious updating to match what’s out there today; without it the user is left with a Google search project, not a ‘How to Deploy Rails’ book.

Annoyed – and disappointed.

wb

Back when I was developing user applications I told my team:

“Eat you own dog food”

In other words, live in the world you are building for your users – if you can’t live in it, neither can they.

I have feeling this book’s authors didn’t eat enough of their own dog food – and it shows.

wb

Warren, thanks for the feedback and sorry the book hasn’t met your expectations. A couple thoughts:

You may want to try running the examples on an Ubuntu VirtualBox instance using Vagrant. That’s how we hoped to provide a standard environment on which to demonstrate the examples. I can’t speak for Tony, but it’s been quite a while since I’ve worked on a Windows box using Cygwin, so I’m not surprised that you’re running into problems there.

The Gemfile we’re referring to is the Gemfile in the sample Rails application, massiveapp. The master branch of the massiveapp repository includes the capistrano gem so that you can clone that branch and see a deployment in action:

https://github.com/deployingrails/massiveapp/bl…

Generally speaking, I think you’ll have more success if you attempt to run the examples on a VM.

By the way, are you also deploying your Rails app on Windows? If so… are you using JRuby? You might be interested in Joe Kutner’s book on “Deploying JRuby”.