EngineYard: How can I have a 'private' Ruby-on-Rails staging environment?

Question

How can I deploy my Ruby-on-Rails app to a Staging environment on EngineYard and keep it private to just the development team? As the Rails application being staged includes sign-up/sign-in functionality to be tested, I want to use a separate authentication setup - http basic authentication would be fine, I simply want to reduce the chances of The Public bumping into our site before it's launched.

The purpose is to have a live demo running in cloud server at all times to that business owners abroad can play with the site whenever they want. We're planning on using EngineYard for our deployment currently, but have no real experience with it. (Aside: Heroku was the preferred option, but data protection laws in the EU made us switch to EngineYard. However, there's less community advice available on EngineYard and I'm hazy on how I should use it.)

Any advice appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

I think http://blog.codingspree.net/2011/10/12/basic_authentication_and_rewire_rules_for_you_engine_yard_application.html is an up to date summary of how to configure basic auth for nginx on an EngineYard AppCloud deployment.

Answer 2

Easiest solution would be to just add HTTP basic auth in your ApplicationController for the staging branch.