Rob Seaman

This post describes how to use Capistrano to deploy a Mephisto based blogging engine to a DreamHost account running Phusion Passenger. The blog code is deployed from a local git repository. gitting Started with Mephisto describes how the repository was set-up. With some modifications the script and commands presented here should be adaptable to other hosting services and other Phusion based Rails applications. Read the rest of this entry

Jan. 14, 2009 Update: This post applies to Mephisto 0.8. See Upgrading to Mephisto 0.8.1 for information about moving to version 0.8.1

I took what I bet is a pretty common approach to setting up Mephisto. I put a copy on my laptop, played with it just enough to get it to work and then found and followed some fairly simple instructions to install it directly on my DreamHost account. It was an easy and straight forward approach but in my case by the time I finished my installation I knew I wanted to start over. The problem was that I quickly found myself modifying too many things to get Mephisto to work and look the way I wanted. I could tell it was going to be easier for me in the long run to get the blog engine in source code control with a development and deployment environment that made it to easy tweak and update from my laptop. Since Mephisto is a Rails application I went with the common choices: maintaining the blog code in a local git repository and deploying it using Capistrano.

In this post I cover setting up a custom git branch for Mephisto along with a couple of Mephisto modifications I recommend to prepare it for deployment to a DreamHost account. Actually there's really nothing DreamHost specific here but other hosting services could require additional changes to environment files. I'll cover deployment to DreamHost using Capistrano in a my next post. If you want to take this approach then I'm assuming you're fairly technical and already have git and Rails and MySQL installed on your computer. The use of git and Rails in this post is basic but going down this maintenance and deployment path is only worthwhile if you're reasonably comfortable with both technologies. Read the rest of this entry

I recently set-up a secure shell account for a DreamHost shared hosting account that I intend to use for automating deployment and backup tasks from a Mac OS X Leopard client. While not overly complicated there were a couple of gotchas that I ran into. This post consolidates my findings and gives you a brief background for what's going on when you set up SSH access. The information applies to Mac OS X 10.5.1 or greater. Read the rest of this entry