When I described our Capistrano implementation issues the other day, I was still missing one piece of the puzzle. Our deployment script would run cleanly, but there would be some errors at the end when Capistrano tried to “reap” the running server process and restart it. Because Dreamhost runs the server itself, the process ID of the server process isn’t found in the standard location, and Capistrano was unable to kill it and restart it.
Fortunately, nearly every problem on the ‘net has been found and solved before. I went back to the “Nuby on Rails” script which gave us the “Let Capistrano create current” tip, and found some code in their deploy.rb which handles the problem. With that covered, we’re really back to one-command deployments.
As an aside, something I’ve noticed as I climb the Rails learning curve is a startling number of weblogs professing to be “newbies learning Rails.” Many of them are giving good advice (anybody who can learn from their experience and pass it on is giving usable advice) but few of them are at the “newbie” level any longer, and I could argue that some of them never were. All of us are or were “new” to Rails and Ruby, but like us, I expect most of the authors of these “newbie” sites came to Rails with previous experience in LAMP, .Net, or some other framework. A true “newbie” blog, written by someone with no prior web programming experience (or perhaps no programming experience) would probably be painful to read, though.
I mostly mention this because I’m a little worried that experienced web developers feel a need to be self-deprecating about their skills with Rails. It’s fine if the culture of the framework is for everyone to adopt this “only-an-egg” approach, leaving their minds open for continual learning, but if everyone is disclaiming advanced knowledge in order to avoid responsibility for their suggestions, that’s a little creepy.
Funny you mention that — I have the same sentiments.
Discounting my 12 years of webdev experience (especially when interview for Rails positions) is not giving myself due credit.
Sure, I’m a rails “noob” — but picking it up with programming and LAMP experience is much easier than having never looked or written a line of source code.