I've got a nice Rails development setup going now. Aptana is a very nice IDE, very powerful, very rich. The Rails development aspect is most useful in being able run applications in development mode on my PC. I use the mysql server on the deployment server through an ssh tunnel rather than install a database on the PC.
I have created a subversion repository on my VPSlink server. I have installed the subclipse plugin on Aptana and checked out my application onto the work PC. I work on the application in Aptana, polish it and when it is ready I commit the changes again through Aptana. Then on my server I deploy the code by getting the new version out of subversion. I don't use a simple rsync to deploy and I haven't got into capistrano (the rails deployment tool) going via svn works for me. I might consider putting up something like trac (or a rails based alternative) to give me a development wiki and web browsing of the repository.
I've been thinking about backups and the current plan is to backup the SVN repositorys and mysql dumps from my VPSLink server to my site5 server and vice versa. The VPSLink stuff is more in need of backing up since I am the administrator of that one, the site5 account includes daily backups. I was tempted by rsync.net a nice, simple, flexible and cheap remote backup option but since I already have two accounts with ssh access and 35G of space between them I don't think I need to spend more money. Rsync.net looks appealing but the main thing it is lacking for professional purposes would be Windows file permissions, otherwise I might consider it for backing up the servers at work: being able to recover all ones files is good, not having to spend a week fixing the spaghetti mess of windows access permissions is better.
One major change is that I have reverted from Lighttpd back to Apache on my VPSLink server. The main reason for this was that Lighttpd seems to have some limitations in terms of supporting things like drupal's urls. Lighttpd would be good for simple setups but getting multiple legacy php and rails applications set up is just as troublesome as with Apache so I've gone back to the devil I know.
I've had Apache fail to start with memory errors a few times. This could well be the 500M limit of the VPSLink coming into play. VPSLink is cheap because there is no swap, 500M is my absolute limit. If I start getting memory problems I will have to consider the options:
- I can upgrade the VPSLink to 1G memory but for similar money I could get a cheap dedicated server
- I could get a different VPS account, one that had burst memory (it's the bursts that kill VPSLink) but I do like the performance of VPSLink.
- I could fiddle about tuning the number of apache processes and suchlike but life is too short for that one
This blog is still on the site5 account. The server is being upgraded soon, maybe this will resolve the loading issues it has whenever I try doing some development on it (e.g run 'top' and shriek in horror).
Peter's Moblog
