Vehicle Assembly
================

A small Rails plugin for preparing applications to run on Amazon Web Service's EC2 platform.

Recent updates
--------------

+ Vehicle Assembly now supports ImageMagick and RMagick
+ Full, automated bootstrap and deployment
+ Support for database setup and migrations

Getting started
---------------

Deploying a Rails application on EC2 is relatively straightforward: Vehicle Assembly aims to 
automate the process of managing your deployment is a modular way. 

+ Preparing for launch: 3, 2, 1...

3. Install the Vehicle Assembly plugin:

./script/plugin install git://github.com/mza/vehicle-assembly.git

2. Place your application under launch control:

rake mission_control:init

This will add a couple of files to your application:

Capfile - a general purpose Capistrano file, no need to customise this
config/aws.yml - for your AWS credentials
config/deploy.rb - for your deployment details

1. Customise your setup

Add your Amazon key to the config/aws.yml file, and customise the marked fields in config/deploy.rb. You'll need to set 
your application name, git username and application URL. 

Finally, add the hostname of the EC2 instance you wish you deploy to. For details on starting an instance, take a look 
at: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/


+ Go for launch - begin main engine start...

With the details in place, you're good to go. 

Boot strap your instance with Apache, Passenger and MySQL:

cap bootstrap:cold
cap database:init

Then, deploy your app:

cap deploy:cold

Hit up your EC2 instance to check everything is ship shape, and then point your public URL there. We'd recommend adding 
an Elastic IP to your service.


Rails in the Cloud
------------------

There are other ways of putting your application in the cloud. We can highly recommend:

+ EC2 on Rails: http://ec2onrails.rubyforge.org/


License
-------

Copyright (c) 2009 Matt Wood, released under the MIT license