Section 5. Production Deployment

It's nearly impossible to tell you how to deploy a real production deployment. Each organization has its own peculiar brand of software, hardware, policies, procedures, people, quirks, and just plain dumb stuff they do on a daily basis. Trying to cover every possible thing you'd run into could (and does) fill up entire bookshelves.

In this section we'll go through one typical production deployment. We'll make it platform-agnostic and mention the places where you'll have to know your stuff about your system. This production deployment will not cover Windows since that's a whole book in itself and it's very rare for people to do anything but small- to medium-sized Ruby deployments on Windows.^[3]

^[3] This isn't a dig on Windows, it's just a reality of Ruby and how it runs on Windows.

What we'll do is walk through a choice of hardware, software, where the software goes, how best to configure it at first, and how to test each component in stages. After that you'll have to monitor your deployment to make sure it continues to run and start planning for your next big move should you grow out of this installation. We will leave this part of the configuration to you and other larger books you can find.