Thank you for this, Casper. I'm a Dreamhost customer and and this has cleaned up some 'failed to start' problems I've been having. Its also made deploying some examples I have on my laptop easier since now I can just have Apache deal with them on an as-needed basis instead of having to do a "cd ~/Ruby/<application>; ./script/server &" each time.
However there is one aspect of deploying on Dreamhost that I'd like to ask the group here about, and that is getting the content of the database out there. My first deployment of Radiant on Dreamhost last year I had developed on my laptop using SQlite3. The laptop runs Linux, not Windows. I used a CSS file in the file system (lacking sophistication and understanding of Radiant at that time). I SFTP'd the files, including the database, to the Dreamhost machine but the application wouldn't start. It couldn't open the database. I don't know if this was a word-length, library or version problem. The application content was small enough that I could create a new database on Dreamhost and paste the pages in. Radiant is more sophisticated now. The sites I'm developing use extensions such as attachments, galleries, and of course the brilliant styles_n_scripts. Even before the site content is added there is a lot of the site structure in the database now. And before adding 'real' content I find that I lay out the hierarchy/structure and few pieces of boilerplate like a 'site map', 'About', and content and feedback pages. So I have a very simple problem of how do I get this database that I've developed as a the template or basic site content out to Dreamhost? Reality is that by the time I've worked a bit it is more than just a template, not least of all because the actual CSS and actual logos and and snippets that deal with names etc are in the database too, as well as many place-holders. You know how it goes. I've just spent a very futile week prior to deploying my new web site on Dreamhost trying to convert a Sqlite3 database to a MySQL database on my laptop. I tried this so that I could "debug" any problems ahead of time. There have been nothing but problems. I have had no success. I started with the import/export extension. It doesn't work. At the very least it only knows about some of the tables. I corresponded with Sean about the problem and tried his suggestions. Zilch. I also searched the web. There are many articles about converting Sqlite3 to MySQL. The ones on the MySQL site are plain wrong! Others admit to things like differencing SQL syntax but their 'fixes' are incomplete. Even after much hand editing of the Sqlite3 ".dump" file MySQL kept erroring. Some problems I could not find any reason for even though the revised syntax was A-OK according to the MySQL documentation. Chris Dwan posted a tool that allowed copy from one DB to another. http://blog.radixhound.com/2008/4/28/backing-up-radiant-cms-using-sqlite3 I'm going to try this today on my laptop. I'll report on how it goes. However there is still the problem of getting the database running on Dreamhost and getting content into it there. The reason I'm writing about this at length is that I am very surprised that Rails doesn't have tools for all this as part of its baseline. Rails2 has moved to Sqlite3 as its default, and that's fine for development. But I get to wonder if there are going to be more projects that are like Radiant in that the database has a template and structure that is part of the application and needs to be 'portable' as well. Rails really needs something that can do database export/import in a comprehensive and complete manner. Casper Fabricius said the following on 03/06/08 03:17 AM: > Hi Nate, > > I recently updated the guide for deploying Radiant to Dreamhost, > another shared host: > http://wiki.radiantcms.org/How_To_Deploy_on_Dreamhost > > I don't know Railsplayground, but assuming you have SSH access you > should be able to follow this guide, substituting the steps for > creating the website and a database with whatever you do at > Railsplayground. Also, my blog entry has examples of rolling two > popular extensions into the deployment package: > http://casperfabricius.com/blog/2008/05/24/radiant-cms-on-dreamhost-with-phusion-passenger/ -- Expecting life to treat your fairly because you are a good person is like expecting an angry bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian. -- Shari R Barr _______________________________________________ Radiant mailing list Post: Radiant@radiantcms.org Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
