Any tips for deploying a new revision of a rails view?

Question

We have a rails site up and running and we've just created a new version of the front end (completely new view, css, JS, etc).

What is the best way to partition this from the current site such that we can run both concurrently (whilst A/B testing)? I'm not so much worried about how to execute the A/B testing, as I am concerned about partitioning the files/data. I thought of two possibilities:

1. The most straightforward thing I could think of was to subclass the application_controller, etc.
2. Another option would be to just completely branch the app and do all of the renovations in place, then run the A/B testing from a load balancer redirection to the two apps.

Does anybody have some good insight for this?

Cheers, Mike

Answer 1

I have no direct experience in deploying such a thing, but in my opinion branching and deploying a separate app sounds cleaner to me.