I’ve kinda changed the whole platform mibly.com is running on. I’ll outline here what’s changed and why.

Source control
iPlayerlist and some other projects I’m involved with now use Git, rather than Subversion for source management. The Rails core team have also moved over. So being the Technology magpie I sometimes am I jumped on to the latest shinny thing. Github. My code is now stored at Github, and I deploy from there too. It’s such a nice interface and nice not to have to worry about setting up repositories and deal with user management.

Application server
The old server used to run on Apache 2 front end with 3 mongrel instances in the background. 2 for iPlayerlist and one for this blog. It was a pain to set up and rather limited. Since then however, Phusion Passenger, a.k.a. mod_rails has come on leaps and bounds. Its fast, spawns new threads when needed and easier to use and to implement. I now Passenger along with apache2. yay.

Deployment
The old install used Capistrano. So does this one, as its lovely. However, I’m now up and running with the latest (version 2 strain) of Capistrano with support for Git. A little bit code is added to help Passenger to gracefully restart after all my code is checked out from github.

Host
I’ve moved from slicehost to get a larger 512mb slice at railsplayground. It was a bit of a bargain and to be honest, 256mb can be a bit limiting when it comes to RubyGems and passenger.