Over Memorial Day weekend I migrated my Rails Application to Dreamhost using mod_rails (Passenger). It was not an entirely smooth process but I was also upgrading from Rails 1.8.x at the same time. That was compounded by making the foolish mistake of trying to rebuild my database using Rake migrations. (That’s a bad idea. I could have saved many hours by just uploading the schema)

Here is the procedure I followed (hat tip to Nock):

1. cd ~/
2. rails your_app_name -d mysql
3. Copy app/, database.yml, routes.rb, db/
4. Change public/.htaccess from .cgi to .fcgi
5. put your app into production mode (uncomment line 5 in environment.rb)
6. run rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production
7. chmod -R 755 ~/your_app_name/app
8. rm your_app_name/public/index.html
9. killall -USR1 dispatch.fcgi
10. killall -USR1 ruby

One comment on step 4. For some reason none of my stylesheets would load. Much of the advice gleaned from endless Google searches seemed to suggest that the problem would be fixed by setting the RewriteBase in /public/.htaccess. That turned out to not be the case.

My stylesheet problem was caused by having this line twice in my .htaccess file

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi[QSA,L]

DO NOT uncomment the one before RewriteEngine On , as all the tutorials seem to imply, just change the .cgi to .fcgi in the block below it.

Thanks to Dreamhost for their stellar support over a frustrating (for me!) Memorial Day weekend. In the end, (as is so often the case), very little of the frustration was caused by Dreamhost or mod_rails but, rather, by some of the vagaries of Rails. I’m guessing that future deployments would be much smoother as this was my first time deploying to a shared hosting environment.