When to start thinking about deploying my rails app

I have been testing an app and have all of the functionality worked out. Being my first go with ror I have a few questions about my next step; grateful for direction on this.

Should I do all of the design and UI before putting my app online, or after?

In trying to research this I have found three things that keep coming up as great tools to help deploy - Heroku, Capistrano, and Phusion Passenger. I know Heroku let's you deploy quickly and easily, but is this the option if I want my app at it's own URL? I currently host other websites (Wordpress) at Hostmonster, but they aren't supporting Rails 3 yet.

What is the difference between the functionality of Passenger and开发者_StackOverflow中文版 Capistrano? I have been searching, but not knowing some of the terminology, I'm not sure how to decipher all of it.

Go with Heroku — there's no need to clutter your brain with all of the hosting stuff since you don't already know it. Heroku is great, and you can easily have your own domain name. Point your nameservers to a.ns.zerigo.net and b.ns.zerigo.net and run…

heroku addons:add zerigo_dns
heroku domains:add example.com
heroku domains:add www.example.com

Set your domain's DNS servers to a.ns.zerigo.net and b.ns.zerigo.net.

And done deal, you're ready to deploy on Heroku. Your first dyno (app instance) is free, Zerigo's basic dns is free. You're rolling with 2TB/bandwidth (soft limit) and a whole lotta request-serving for a grand total of $0 and 15 minutes.

And for deployment, from start to finish here (provided you develop within the limitations of Heroku's platform [ie. read-only filesystem, PostgreSQL, bundler-dependent]):

heroku create yourapp
git push heroku master
heroku open  # opens yourapp.herokuapp.com in your default browser

If you need to configure your DNS records:

heroku addons:open zerigo_dns

It's like magic, but it's all just solid engineering.

And to be clear, I don't work for Heroku.

Whether to finish your UI designing before going live is a decision you have to make. I don't think this will have any rails - deployment related consequences. So if you want to deploy and release fast in a rapid manner, go ahead.

You should be able to use your own domain name even if you are hosting with heroku. Take a look at this

Capistrano lets you deploy your apps with ease. So you don't have to login to your remote server and pull code from git, restart services...etc etc. You can just run cap deploy from your workstation and everything will be deployed on your server and all services will be restarted..etc.

While passenger is something like mod_php. It hosts your application. It works with apache or nginx. You will most probably end up using both capistrano and passenger. I don't think they are comparable because they do two different things.