How do I deploy my Rails Application

I've been spending the last few months on developing a (my first) Rails application all by my self, just me and my Linux box, all in my development RAILS_ENV, no SCM ("for shame!") or anything. It has become quite the beast now and I am getting ready to release it onto the world. My question is: how am I ever going to make this work?

I installed gems, plugins, servers (MySQL, node.js, nginx, sphinx, juggernaut), photo compression apps that I call, video compression tools (FFMPEG) etc, I also obviousl开发者_开发知识库y have a DB and a (lot of) seed data. I can't even remember all the things I did to my system to make it all work, but it does.

So now, when I deploy this on some stranger's server, how do I make sure that all those things get installed and configured correctly? How is e.g. FFMPEG ever going to get installed on this server when I deploy my application. How will the seed data get uploaded, how will the servers get started, with the right parameters etc.

I have read (a little bit) about Capistrano which seems to be the deployment tool of choice in the Rails community, but I am not sure if that will cover all my needs. For example, how do I figure out all the gems I used or the plugins (do I even need to know?). Is there any way I can test the deployment on my own linux box,the same I am developing on, i.e. pretend that I am hosting my own production server/rails_env and "deploy" it there?

Any help will be much appreciated.

Cheers.

There a lot of standards to follow that make life easier...

As far as figuring out which gems you need, you could try and use RVM and make a local config that you keep adding gems to until your app works. This will be kind of like starting from scratch so that you are sure to know precisely what configuration you need to run. (And it should make it easy to stand up a new, identical environment each time.)

The RVM route will allow you to test in a specific environment, which should help.

You can list the required gems in your environment.rb file so that the server demands them on start-up.

Good Luck, Cowboy .