I just finished my first attempt at deploying a web app to run automatically in the background on a friend’s server. Pretty easy, really. The first thing I did was install foreman. Assuming you have ruby and rubygems installed:

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$ sudo gem install foreman

Next I needed to give foreman the commands to start my app. I created a file in the root of my project directory called ‘Procfile’ and gave it the steps I would run to start my app manually. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say I run my app pretty barebones:

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web: bundle exec rackup

Now when I run foreman start, foreman will use Bundler to execute rackup with the correct gems in my Gemfile. Now exporting upstart config files is pretty easy.

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$ sudo foreman export upstart --app=MyApp --user=root /etc/init

That command creates the .conf files needed for upstart to control the service called ‘MyApp’ as the user ‘root.’ It puts all the .conf files in /etc/init (which is where Ubuntu puts such things) and will create a default log directory in /var/log/MyApp. Now I can control my service by running service MyApp start, service MyApp stop, service MyApp restart, and service MyApp status. Hooray for me.

But I need to run my app in two ways: in dev mode on a local port with my dev database, and I need to run it in production mode using port 80 and the production database. I’ve also heard that using webrick (the default server installed with rackup) is great for develpment, but I should be using something else for my production server. So I made some config files for foreman:

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RACK_ENV=development
PORT=9292
SERVER=rackup

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RACK_ENV=production
PORT=80
SERVER=unicorn

And I change my Procfile to:

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web: bundle exec $SERVER -p $PORT -E $RACK_ENV

Ridiculously configured. Now when I run foreman start, it will error out. I need to specify my environment file:

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$ foreman start -e production.env

Now foreman will use Bundler to startup the server specified in $SERVER, run the app on port $PORT (-p), and will pass through the environment listed as $RACK_ENV to my application (-E), allowing my app to do whatever configuration it does given the current environment. Power to the people.

I found that this guy does a lot more complicated stuff with Foreman, if you need more.