I was going to come comment that there must be a good way to solve this, since the Ruby community has such a rich ecosystem of tools.

Heroku, for example, has a nice one-click deploy button for Rails (and many more languages/frameworks). It works straight from the source code, such as with this open-source rails app, and it's really quite impressive:

https://github.com/heroku/starboard#deploy-the-app

The author also calls out error reporting as being terrible. And there's also great tools for managing that, such as newrelic and airbrake.

So surely this author was just unused to the tool ecosystem, I thought. What a perfect opportunity for a constructive yet snarky comment! But lo and behold, discourse has deprecated all non-docker installs:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/inst...

I was, and am, completely baffled at that decision. And I learned a valuable lesson about trying to out-snark snarky blog posts.