El Dorado

Hi Trevor,

It looks like you have done a significant amount of work squashing bugs lately!

Any idea when you'll release those changes?

...and in a related subject:

I'm kinda new to the whole "hosting a rails app" thing. Do you have any helpful advice/general lessons-learned/tips on upgrading a rails app with changes while not destroying my current data?

anything would be appreciated.

I've glanced slightly at the whole Capistrano thing, but I'm nervous to get involved with it.

You can always download the latest version from github, but I won't do a release until I add some major features. The next one will have a blog, maybe themes, and possibly localization (language support). Capistrano is great, and I recommend it. I'm not sure what to tell you about hosting. Dreamhost just added mod_rails support, which might be the easiest thing to do. Other than that, you'll have to do your own VPS, which might be hard if you've never done anything like it before.

I miscommunicated.

I'm running Ubuntu server edition at the house and have a full Rails stack up and running. I've already got my el-dorado installed and running on it. I redirect DNS through DynDNS so my friends can all hit the server. El-Dorado is running on Mysql, mongrel, and nginx.

I guess I'm really asking (new to MySQL admining, too), how do I back up my data so I don't hurt it when I upgrade/make changes? and, how do I merge the changes I grab off of github into my currently running el-dorado instance?

The best bet is going to be using Capistrano. Check out the README and the config/deploy.example.rb file for an idea. Maybe try a fresh app using Capistrano all the way, and you'll be able to check that everything is working well. The only thing to be careful of is that your uploaded files in public/files, public/avatars, etc should be saved. With Capistrano, those directories are symlinked to a special "system" folder that is out of the way of your deployments. If you're upgrading manually, you'll need to do that stuff manually, and also make sure you back up your database and files manually.