We’ve just released a new version of the Brightbox deployment gem. The gem has supported bundler for a long time, but now calls to rake tasks use bundler too (if the app is bundler enabled of course). This solves the problem some people were having where the right gems weren’t available during rake execution, or rake itself complained about a rake version mismatch.
We’ve built Ubuntu packages for the latest release of Phusion Passenger, 3.0.11. They’re available now on our apt repository and our Launchpad ppa. Instructions on how to get set up are on our wiki as usual.
Updated NGINX Passenger packages will follow shortly (they’ll be available via a separate ppa)
We’ve built Ubuntu packages for the latest release of Passenger, 3.0.8. They’re available now on our apt repository and our Launchpad ppa. Instructions on how to get set up are on our wiki as usual.
Updated NGINX Passenger packages will follow shortly (they’ll be available via a separate ppa)
The latest release of Fog (0.3.19) includes support for the new Brightbox Cloud API. Fog is a Ruby library which provides an “abstraction layer” for interacting with multiple cloud computing APIs.
Created by Wesley Beary and recently adopted into Engine Yard’s open source programme, Fog has a lot of momentum and is a great way to get started with provisioning resources across multiple cloud providers.
If you’ve not yet done so, request a Brightbox Cloud beta account to get started.
Phusion Passenger 3.0.0 was released back in October. It’s up to 55% faster and sports new stability features, which should keep your site up even if a faulty app instance causes problems (such as “out of memory” errors).
We’ve now got Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid packages available on our apt repository and we consider it ready for production use. Brightbox customers can upgrade from Passengr 2.x simply by running these commands on their Brightboxes:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -qy libapache2-mod-passengerIf you’ve not got a Brightbox, you’ll need to add our apt repository key and config first. You can read more about it on our wiki.
The team at Phusion have been hard at work on Passenger 3 and last week released a beta version for testing. Continuing our work with Passenger 2, we’ve been working hard on packaging it.
We now have Passenger 3.0.0-pre3 packages available for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) and Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy). As they’re pre-release versions, we don’t recommend them in production just yet and have put them in their own repository to prevent any accidental upgrades.
If you’re not already a Brightbox customer, then you’ll need to set up base access to our apt repository first.
Otherwise, just add the new passenger-testing repository (switch “lucid” to “hardy” if you’re on Hardy):
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.brightbox.net lucid passenger-testing" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-passenger-testing.list'
Then you can upgrade/install 3.0.0-1bbox1~pre3
apt-get update
apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger
Passenger now has a native library, which depends on your version of ruby. For simplicity, these packages currently require the ruby1.8 packages to be installed. You can, of course, switch to ruby1.9 and passenger will auto-compile the necessary native support for you. We’ll be providing packages for 1.9 support soon, so you won’t need to rely on the auto-compiling.
After two years of hard work, the third generation of Rails is ready for the big time! Rails 3 brings about some major changes to make things all together “better, faster, cleaner, and more beautiful” and solve some of the common issues seen with Rails 2. Some of the major highlights include
Improved router syntax for Action Controller
The router syntax in Rails 3 has been completely revamped to build on the work from Rails 2 and provide a more elegant and flexible way to provide completely RESTful access for controllers. To get started see the new routing guide.
Brand new Action Mailer
Action Mailer was previously a bit of a hybrid, part controller, part model. Rails 3 sees Action Mailer completely rewritten purely as a controller, it now behaves much more like Action Controller. The new Action Mailer guide describes how to get going.
New query engine for Active Record
Active Record has adopted a new query engine to make complex queries more consistent and manageable. Execution of queries is now delayed until actually required and not when defined. For an introduction to the new query engine check out the new new Active Record guide.
Bundler
Traditionally, managing the dependencies for your Rails app deployment can be a bit of a nightmare. While Capistrano, Rake and other partial solutions make automating things easier, they’re often not elegant or simple. Bundler provides a complete solution to managing gems, libraries, frameworks and plugins that your app depends on. The latest release of the Brightbox deployment gem offers full support for Bundler.
Other improvements include built in XSS protection, an official plugins API, Agnosticism with plugins, Active Model callbacks & validations, better handling of character encoding and many more. For a more comprehensive list of changes see the release notes.
Getting up and running with Rails 3 on your Brightboxes should be as simple as you’re used to with your existing Rails 2 apps.
We’ve built new 32 & 64bit Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.02 packages for Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid. The 2010.02 release of Ruby EE includes a number of backported fixes for critical bugs in Ruby 1.8.7p249 and we recommend users currently using our 2010.01 packages upgrade immediately.
For further information on using these packages see the release announcement for our Ruby EE 2010.01 packages.
Available from today, you can now choose either Ubuntu Hardy or Lucid as the base OS when building new Brightboxes.
Ubuntu Lucid is the latest Long Term Support (LTS) version of Ubuntu with security fixes provided until April 2015. It brings a whole bunch of upgrades such as Ruby 1.8.7, Monit 5, Apache 2.2.14 and new packages like CouchDB, Sphinx, Chef, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, ejabberd and many more.
We’ve treated it to the usual Brightbox Ruby deployment tune-up, including our Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7-2010.01 packages. Updated Phusion Passenger packages are now available on our newly Lucid-enabled apt repository.
When buying a new Brightbox, you’ll see a combo box that you can use to select Lucid (Hardy is still currently the default). Upgrading from Hardy to Lucid isn’t really viable due to the way Hardy boxes handle kernels, so you’ll either need to request a re-image (which involves wiping your box, so make backups!) or buy a new box and move your apps to it.
We’ve built new 32bit and 64bit Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.01 packages for Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid. The new packages are now the default on new Lucid beta boxes. For Hardy, as before these packages are quite a major change from the default Hardy Ruby interpreter,which is 1.8.6, so we recommend you test thoroughly before putting it into production.
As with our other Ruby EE packages, they upgrade (i.e replace) the standard 1.8 Ruby installation. This means all your gems stay the same, and everything on your system immediately starts using them (Phusion’s own Ubuntu packages do not work like this).
These packages are also the best way to get Ruby 1.8.7 on Hardy, which you’ll need if you’re playing with Rails 3.
If you’re on a Hardy based Brightbox, just create or edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list to contain the rubyee-testing component like so:
deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ hardy rubyee-testingIf you’re on one of our Lucid beta boxes provisioned before today, simply create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list and add the rubyee component:
deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ lucid rubyeeFinally, update and upgrade libruby1.8:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libruby1.8 irb1.8 libopenssl-ruby1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8 rdoc1.8 ruby1.8
If you’re not on a Brightbox, see the instructions on our wiki first. The wiki also documents how to revert back to the old packages.