New Boxcar plans announced!
Yesterday we announced our new suite of plans for Rails Boxcar. You can now get started with a pre-configured VPS designed by Rails developers like you for as low as $59/month.
You can check out our new rates here:
If you’re at RailsConf, be sure to introduce yourself and ask for details. :-)
Boxcar Conductor plugin moved
Update. We’ve moved the Boxcar Conductor plugin for deploying Ruby on Rails applications to a new location on GitHub.
You can still submit bugs/feature requests on Lighthouse here:
Enjoy!
Boxcar on Twitter
We’re about to roll out some announcements for Boxcar, our professional VPS hosting solution for Ruby on Rails applications. As we roll out these new updates, we’re going to offer some extra special deals to those who are following us on twitter. :-)
If you want in on the action…
As usual, we’ll be posting some announcements on our blog as well… so be sure to subscribe to our feed.
Boxcar Conductor: Rails deployment made easy
In a previous post, I showed how we’ve been working on an interactive deployment process for Rails applications to reduce the time it takes to deploy to a Boxcar.
We began to move our Boxcar deployment recipes into it’s own Rails plugin and just made it available on GitHub.
Introducing Boxcar Conductor
The Boxcar Conductor plugin aims to automate the entire process for deploying to your Boxcar. We’re down to just a few simple commands to run to get your application up and running. While mileage may vary with other hosting providers, we did want to open up this work to the community and centralize our work with the community of Boxcar customers who have helped us build and test these tools.
Install Boxcar Conductor
If you’re running on Edge Rails… you can take advantage of the new support for installing plugins in git repositories.
$ ./script/plugin install git://github.com/planetargon/boxcar-conductor.git
note: If you’re not using edge rails, you can download a tarball and install the plugin manually.
Installing the plugin will add a custom Capfile and config/deploy.rb, which has a few things for you to define based on your Boxcar subscription.
Configure Your Boxcar
Once the plugin is installed, you can run the following task:
$ cap boxcar:config
This will ask you a few questions about your deployment needs.
- Which database server will you be using? (along with db user/pass info)
- How many mongrels should run in your cluster?
After a few quick multiple choice answers, you’re application is ready to be deployed and you can run an Boxcar-specific deployment task.
$ cap deploy
We’ve also created a new public project on Lighthouse so that you can submit tickets and ideas to us. With Boxcar, we’re really aiming to remove as many steps from the deployment process that aren’t necessary.
To follow along, visit the project on lighthouse or GitHub.
If you’re interested in learning more about Rails Boxcar, feel free to drop us a line.
Related Posts
Announcing Cobalt and monthly subscriptions for Boxcar
We’ve been designing and developing a new centralized billing platform over the past few months and late last week, we launched it! Along with this new billing platform, we launched another new application, Cobalt, which is a new account management and support tool for our hosting customers.
We’ll be migrating all of our past customers over to this new system in time, but are initially using it for new Boxcar customers.
We’ve been building the new system to use Braintree as our new credit card payment gateway. With this switch, we’re also introducing monthly subscription rates for Boxcar, which means that you can try it out month-to-month now.
Over the next few weeks/months, we’ll be announcing several features to Cobalt that will ease your Rails deployment experience.
I want to thank all those on my team that helped get these new applications up and running.
If you’re looking for professional VPS-based Rails hosting, hop on our train by ordering a Boxcar today for $99/month!
For more information, visit railsboxcar.com or Planet Argon.
Also, be sure to follow Boxcar on twitter.
Launch your own RubyURL
A few weeks ago, I moved RubyURL from subversion to git. During that process, I decided to use my invite to GitHub and have decided to go ahead and open up the source code.
It’s currently a whopping 92 LOC with a 1:2.5 code to spec ratio. (I had a goal to keep is below 100 LOC)
- RubyURL on GitHub: http://github.com/robbyrussell/rubyurl
- Public Clone URL: git://github.com/robbyrussell/rubyurl.git
Feel free to grab it and help contribute. This has served almost 14 million redirects since August 2007 and is running on a Rails Boxcar.
To grab it with git.. run: git clone git://github.com/robbyrussell/rubyurl.git.
Feel free to submit tickets to the Rubyurl ticket system.
Enjoy!
UPDATE Ryan McGeary was kind enough to be the first person to help track down a bug and submit patches. :-)
