Rob Seaman

Last month Mephisto 0.8.1: Drax was relaunched. Seeing activity on Mephisto was great news in itself. The update includes support for Rails 2.2.2 and several significant security fixes. The release is considered experimental but important because of the security fixes. That's a bit of a mixed message but I have no financial stake in my blog so decided to do an update.

This post describes my update process. It provides some general information about the changes and provides an example of using interactive git rebasing but in most cases it won't be a cookie cutter approach that you can follow for your own Mephisto implementation. In gitting Started with Mephisto and other posts I've described how I set-up Mephisto 0.8. Unless you've followed along and are maintaining Mephisto in the same way, or at least maintain your Mephisto blog in a git repository with customizations in your own branch, then your update procedure will probably be significantly different. Read the rest of this entry

Jan. 14, 2009 Update: The techniques discussed in this post are still relevant but the externals only apply to Mephisto 0.8. See Upgrading to Mephisto 0.8.1 for information about the externals that I'm currently caching.

Cached Externals is a Rails plugin that extends Capistrano to speed up deployments by not deploying vendor gems and plugins unless they change. The way it accomplishes the performance gain also results in explicit management of the cached gems and plugins, something worthwhile in it's own right. In this this post I'll walk you through installation and use of the plugin by describing how I used it for this Mephisto blog application. gitting Started with Mephisto describes how the application was set-up and Deploying Mephisto with Capistrano to DreamHost provides the pre-Cached Externals deployment details. Basically the app is just a customized copy of Mephisto in a git repository. The vendor directory holds Rails 2.0.2 and TZInfo along with all the gems and plugins that are part of the Mephisto distribution. The repository is kept locally on a laptop so Capistrano's copy strategy is used to deploy it to the production server. Read the rest of this entry