What little things do I need to do before deploying a rails application

Question

EDIT

What small things which are too easy to overlook do I need to do before deploying a rails application?

I have set up another question for any task that takes more than a minute or two, and so ought to be scheduled into a deployment process. In this question I'm mostly concerned with on-line config options and similar, that can be done, but are often left out in during the development cycle because they don't make any difference until deployment

Answer 1

• Freeze the gems you are using rake gems:unpack
• Change the secret in config/environment.rb
• Filter sensitive informtion like passwords: in app/controllers/application.rb filter_parameter_logging :password, :password_confirmation

Answer 2

• Ensure the DB is setup on your production server
• Set up capistrano to deploy your app properly
  • Run a capistrano dry-run
• Ensure Rails is packed into your vendor/rails folder
• Ensure all gems are frozen in your app or installed on your prod server
• Run your tests on the production machine

Answer 3

• Include google analytics snippet (or other analytics)

Answer 4

• Check the slow query log, and add any indexes to your models which are causing full-table traverses.

• Also

  grep -ril FIXME

Answer 5

Set up the files and folders to be shared between deployed copies of the app, including (but not limited to) view caches, database config, maintenance page...

Answer 6

These aren't really Rails-specific deployment-tasks, but I have seen them overlooked too many times for deployed systems:

• Backups; admittedly, this can end up being a big task, but it need not be. Simply scheduling nightly backups of the database and software is often sufficient.
• Testing the restoration procedure
• Log rotation and archiving
• Exception notification

Answer 7

• Make sure that the place you are deploying to has the RAILS_ENV variable properly set. Either through the environment, or through a capistrano callback.
• Make sure your tests are all passing by running rake spec, shoulda, unit tests, or whatever you are using to test.
• Unpack your gems using rake gems:unpack
• Decide whether you need to freeze Rails. rake rails:freeze:gems
• Double check that dependencies are installed on the server if you need more than just gems (memcached, mail server, etc)
• If you are using MySQL, compile and install the C-based MySQL library on the server (this could take longer than a few minutes, but typically is fairly quick if all dependencies are satisfied).
• If you are using git, push your code to the master branch. Tag it if necessary.
• If you are using SVN, tag the release.

Answer 8

I found a very good article for deploying rails app using ubuntu.