Learn Ruby on Rails through Screencast Tutorials on GoRails
Running in Production
English - January 06, 2020 05:00 - 1 hour - 67.8 MB - ★★★★★ - 8 ratingsTechnology News Tech News deployment elixir flask hosting node rubyonrails phoenix production python techstacks Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Chris Oliver goes over how he built his video platform using Ruby on Rails. It's hosted on a single $20 / month DigitalOcean server.
In this episode of Running in Production, Chris Oliver goes over how he
builds and deploys his screencast tutorial platform called GoRails. The site handles about 2 million page views a year on a
single $20 / month DigitalOcean server. GoRails has been up and running since
2014.
There’s a lot of useful nuggets of information in this episode around keeping a
pulse on similar communities that you’re in. For example, Chris took a lot of
inspiration from Laravel when it came to implementing the billing code for
GoRails. Spoiler alert: Rails does scale.
Topics Include
1:42 – Avoiding burn out by having a 2nd project to work on
3:11 – Scratching your own business needs is a healthy way to drive a project
4:13 – GoRails gets 2 million page views a year (~500k unique visitors)
4:36 – Looking at Laravel for inspiration when it comes to batteries included
7:12 – Talking a bit about Bootstrap vs Tailwind CSS
9:47 – Being aware of developer driven vs user driven features
10:24 – GoRails uses server side templates with Turbolinks
13:11 – Using Turbolinks has been good but there are gotchas
14:16 – Flatpickr is a really nice datetime picker with minimal dependencies
14:43 – Websockets and Action Cable aren’t used in GoRails but it is with Hatchbox
17:03 – Introducing just enough JavaScript complexity as needed, but no more
18:54 – Trying to avoid heavy client side JS for performance issues on low end devices
20:09 – GoRails is using Rails 6.x with Webpacker but it’s not using Sidekiq
22:31 – Docker isn’t being used in development or production to keep complexity low
23:40 – PostgreSQL is used as a primary database along with Redis for caching
25:13 – Using the strong migrations gem to help make production migrations less scary
28:23 – Hopefully more advanced database related features make its way into Rails
29:31 – The entire GoRails site is hosted on a single $20 / month DigitalOcean server
30:24 – Making extensive use of multi-level caching helps a lot for performance
31:57 – Passenger is being used as the web server (it’s an nginx module)
34:15 – Let’s Encrypt is still being used on the server for end to end encryption
36:28 – Errbit is being used for catching errors which gets emailed back to him
37:47 – Keeping tracking in house with Ahoy to keep costs down and help against fraud
40:35 – Wistia is used for hosting / streaming videos and it has useful built in metrics
43:04 – Manually transcoding video is hard and expensive (Wistia does the dirty work here)
44:02 – Both Stripe and BrainTree are being used as payment gateways
45:49 – Inspired by Laravel, Chris wrote a Rails Engine called Pay
46:50 – It took 3 months to get payments to work with Stripe’s new SCA APIs
48:12 – Accepting payments went from being simple to outrageously complex
50:24 – You should deal with SCA now in the US to future proof yourself later
52:06 – Even the database is hosted on that single $20 server (2 CPU cores / 4 GB of memory)
52:36 – Honestly the database for GoRails is pretty tiny but it’s heavily backed up
55:39 – Walking through the deployment process from development to production
57:57 – GoRails isn’t using Hatchbox yet, but it will be eventually
58:13 – Upgrading Ubuntu LTS releases gets tricky without a 2nd web server
59:46 – Having a managed database would help with upgrading servers with minimal risk
1:00:41 – There’s a few seconds of down time for each deploy at the moment
1:01:30 – Passenger isn’t just for Ruby apps, it works with Python and Node too
1:02:34 – Everything will come up automatically after a system reboot
1:05:25 – Environment variables are protected with Rails’ encrypted credentials
1:07:39 – Best tips? Things are more changeable than you think, keep it simple initially
1:08:20 – Always keep your master branch deployable with automated tests
1:10:12 – Open sourcing and writing about the tools you’ve built helps everyone
1:13:08 – Chris is on twitter @excid3, also check out GoRails, Hatchbox.io and Jumpstart
Links
📄 References
https://www.hatchbox.io/
https://jumpstartrails.com/
https://twitter.com/dhh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY (famous 15 minute blog in Rails)
https://tailwindcss.com/
https://twitter.com/adamwathan
https://github.com/flatpickr/flatpickr
https://twitter.com/andrewkane
https://egghead.io/
⚙️ Tech Stack
rails →
ruby →
turbolinks →
stimulusjs →
bootstrap →
braintree →
cloudflare →
digitalocean →
lets-encrypt →
nginx →
postgres →
redis →
s3 →
stripe →
ubuntu →
webpack →
wistia →
🛠 Libraries Used
https://github.com/rails/webpacker
https://github.com/brandonhilkert/sucker_punch
https://github.com/ankane/strong_migrations
https://github.com/ankane/production_rails
https://github.com/ankane/secure_rails
https://github.com/phusion/passenger
https://github.com/puma/puma
https://github.com/errbit/errbit
https://github.com/ankane/ahoy
https://github.com/pay-rails/pay
https://github.com/backup/backup
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