Setting up Ruby on Rails on Media Temple's Grid Service

For this blog we’ve opted to host on Media Temple’s Grid Service. “Hundred’s of servers for the price of one” – It sounds impressive, it’s a shame it wasn’t particularly straight forward to get Rails going.

The idea behind the Grid Service plan is that your site can consume as much processing power as it requires. It can survive a digg attack, which is no small feat, especially given it’s a relatively budget plan.

However, if you’re looking for straight forward Rails hosting I’m not sure I’m convinced. You have to actually enable the Rails ‘Container’ and then install Rails and all the gems etc. yourself in the command line. You’ve even got to install the database drivers. Now this is fine if you’re into that kind of thing but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for beginners.

The hosting plan is obviously setup like this to remain as flexible as possible as a lot of users will be hosting PHP sites and won’t be interested in Rails, but it is somewhat tedious and time consuming.

Especially as the installation is not typical, which means you don’t really have the flexibility in the installation that you might expect. Due to the container environment of the Grid Service, Media Temple have to compile their own gems, you can’t just go type ‘gem install’ for any old gem like you might be used to. First you must setup their package manager and gems must be installed from the Media Temple repository. Even standard Capistrano can’t be used, you’ve got to install Media Temple’s version.

Media Temple do document their custom Rails install process well but unfortunately I couldn’t find any articles from them on deploying with Capistrano and SVN. However, I did stumble across a comprehensive step by step guide entitled The complete guide to Rails on Media Temple’s Grid Server which does cover every thing you’ll need to know. At least, that’s how we got this blog up and running.