As you can see by yesterday's humongous release, I'm working on getting vlad lively again. My current plan is/was:
- [DONE] Get vlad on its feet.
- [DONE] Triage all bugs. Fix the biggies.
- [DONE] Pull as much as we can from The ClusterFuck™ (aka github).
- [DONE] Release 1.3.0
- Release 1.3.1 with any fixes from 1.3.0 fallout.
- Decide what the current 80% case is for rails these days and possibly change our defaults to fit that.
- Find owners for all other vlad plugins, split them off as separate gems (eg: vlad-mercurial, vlad-nginx, etc).
- Release 2.0.0, the newer, thinner, prettier vlad. Consider adding bows in vlad's hair.
So, I'd like your feedback:
What is the current favored deployment strategy? (I mean in terms of actual numbers, not this week's popular toy.)
Currently vlad has the following defaults:
:app => :mongrel,
:scm => :subversion,
:web => :apache,
Should any of these change?
ETA:
I just deleted a bunch of comments chock-full with that railz0r "+1" horse-shit. The plural of anecdote is not data. I'm not asking people to vote. I'm asking for actual numbers on big installations out there. I want the few people who own the hardware the slices are running on, not the individuals using the slices.
I'm glad that Vlad development has been revived. I admit that I am a part of the github cluster f*.
As far as defaults go, I didn't like having defaults. Everyone is going to have his own. I use Vlad to deploy a few different kinds of apps (e.g. merb and rails), including some that are not even web apps. Therefore, I do not even have a single default set. In my version, I basically did nothing by default and had to plug in my recipes every time. With that, my only consistent thing is that I only use git these days for scm.
For what it's worth, the official Rails site says:
"The preferred deployment setup for Rails is Phusion Passenger aka mod_rails. It's a module for Apache that automatically manages the back end. Just setup, launch, and enjoy."
http://rubyonrails.org/deploy
...and they use git as the official repository:
http://github.com/rails/rails/tree/master
Of course that might not reflect what people are actually using in the real world, but it might be a good idea to sync Vlad with the "recommended by rails" deployment strategy.
I just deleted the rest of the "+1"s that went through and approved the above two comments. They're thoughtful and they actually offer information.
trevorturk, thanks for the info. It is good to know that the official recommendations have changed.
ottobar, providing no defaults is an interesting proposal I hadn't considered before. Maybe I should look into that. I'll discuss it with the reservoir nerds. thanks.
This survey seems to show about half of the people that took it use Passenger: http://rails-hosting.com/Results/SurveySummary.html
All our current projects run with these defaults: :app => :passenger, :scm => git, :web => :apache
I think many deployers would be glad (me included) with advanced git-support would be improved and passenger would be fully supported. Currently passenger-restart (aka touch tmp/restart.txt) is not supported - and git-support does not work anymore in vlad 1.3.0/1.3.1...
Anyway - thanks for vlad!