This project is an Ansible playbook for provisioning and deploying a Rails/MySQL app to an Ubuntu server. It is intended to be added to an existing Rails application folder. Tested with: Rails 5.1.5, Ruby 2.4.3, Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial).

1. Ansible >= 2.4.1 must be installed

2. This playbook assumes you are targeting MySQL for your production database and have gem 'mysql2' included in your Gemfile.

3. From your Rails application folder run:

   \curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gregvan/ansible-rails/master/installer.sh | bash

   which will:

   1. Add this project to a new folder in your app called "ops"
   2. Initialize the config file
   3. Add 2 new rake tasks to your Rakefile: provision and deploy.

   If you would prefer, you can run the commands in this file manually.

4. Edit the ops/config.yml file and add your project configuration

This Ansible recipe has been adapted to be used with any generic Ubuntu server. to make it work ..

1. Note the role: "base_installs" this is where i put any missing Ubuntu packages
2. Use ssh-copy-id to copy over your credetials to the remote server befor you run 'provision rake'

Provisioning is used to to setup the the server and initially deploy the application.

To provision your server, run: rake provision. This will do the following:

• Install the following:
  • RVM
  • Nginx
  • Phusion passenger
  • MySQL
  • Libraries: libxslt-dev, libxml2-dev, libmysqlclient-dev, imagemagick, gnupg2, uuid-runtime, apt-transport-https
• Create a user with ssh access and sudo authorization
• Setup a daily backup job to backup MySQL database to S3
• Create an app directory with appropriate permissions where Nginx config is pointing to
• Configure TLS (https) via Let's Encrypt
• Define an environment variable named SECRET_KEY_BASE with a unique uuid value.
• Deploy the application:
  • Precompile assets locally with rake assets:precompile.
  • BUT then unlike the upstream ansible-rails.. leave the rest up to Capistrano 3 as a typical 'cap production deploy'. It is slower for initial deploy for sure! but you make it back with subsequent deployments IMHO.

I plan to add both options

• use ansible-rails rSync => If you have already provisioned your server and want to redeploy changes to your Rails app, run rake deploy. This will only run the deploy tasks from the playbook and be much faster.
• use Capistrano 3 => Leave deployment up to Capistrano 3 as a typical 'cap production deploy'. It is slower for initial deploy for sure! but you make it back with subsequent deployments IMHO.