Deploying an RoR app using Jenkins and Knife
The simplest way to deploy a Ruby on Rails app would be to package the deploy-able code into a tar and un-tar it at the server location. This can be achieved using rake but rake doesn't provide ssh ability. Another way is to use rake with Capistrano, but this would be useful when implementing a master-less puppet or chef-solo system for configuration management. Working on an RoR project, recently we discovered another approach to deploy an RoR app - using a custom knife plugin. There is a chef-deploy resource provided by chef which requires git repository access. Standards suggest that there should not be any development tools installed on the application server such as git etc. A series of discussions led us to decide on a chef based approach as we already had chef server managing the configuration on the nodes. Place the following knife plugin in the code repository's .chef/plugins/knife directory. Knife will automatically load the plugin. Configure jenkins as a knife