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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

> Rails made developers incredibly productive at building applications, but it was still painful and time-consuming to get them deployed. Developers might spend weeks (or months) just on deployment.

I’ve never used Rails. What made it so hard to deploy? I always thought it was similar to PHP: setup a DB, maybe fill in a config file or two, and copy the code to the web server. was that not the case?

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One difference was that PHP was specifically designed to be launched by or embedded in a web server and Ruby wasn't. Getting that glue to an unfinicky, unclunky state took some time.

There was frequently more than just a DB; one thing Heroku made easier was adding things like mail serving, memcache, Redis, etc.

The major issue in early Rails deployments though was the dependency hell you got pre-Bundler (equivalent to something like Yarn in the JS world). Most of the fighting with deploys I did was along the lines of "it works on my machine, why doesn't it work on the server?"

Oh, man. I remember that. It seemed like no matter how careful you were, your machines would not be the same, and you'd hit issues.

We went to VMs to get things consistent.

Lots of developers just weren't/aren't good at deploying things, I don't think Ruby was any more difficult personally.

It was common to use Phusion Passenger at the time and it had a similar deployment story.

My one engineer/admin/technical interaction with Ruby on Rails was as the person responsible for overseeing the design, and then the testing and deployment using Passenger on Apache, for a completely bespoke application at a nonprofit.

It left an odd taste in my mouth overall, but it was a valuable learning experience and the application itself was neat. Getting it to run was sorcery.

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