Deploy Rails on MediaTemple Grid Service using Capistrano

Posted 04-06-2009 , updated 09-17-2009

MediaTemple is a web hosting company specializing in hosting Rails applications. My site is served by their once-fashionably named Grid-Service (i.e., “budget” plan). If this page loads slowly, blame MediaTemple.

Presumably, “cap deploy” is an essential feature for nearly all of their customers. Yet, there’s an utter absense of official instructions for deploying a Rails site with Capistrano on MediaTemple.

My deploy.rb script is the result of scraping together tips from from various postings on the computer Internet and a lot of trial and error.

Prerequisites

Getting started with Ruby on Rails (MT document)

Using ssh Keys (MT document)

Capistrano Tasks (RailsCasts screencast)

The secret sauce

config/deploy.rb — See the comments in config/deploy.rb to see how to use it.

config/database.yml

Drop me a line if it worked (or didn’t) for you.