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This article is incomplete.

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Why mina ?

I want something simple. Docker feels like too much work, and the need to store Docker images somewhere is not appealing to me.

I often used Capistrano in the past, even wrote an article about it but I still feel like Capistrano is a little bit slow and don't fully understand how it works under the hood. Too much magic and poor documentation don't help either.

Here are the reason I go forward with mina:

• Much faster than Capistrano (and Docker-based deployment). This is because Mina only SSH once and creates a bash script to execute deployment while Capistrano open a SSH session for each command.
• Deploy code is much simpler and writing tasks is quite easy. There are plug in but I find that writing them myself is really enjoyable and gives me more control on what happens with deployment.
• I want to try something new. I look into Dokku but it seems all the good parts are in paid version. Also I want less magic this time.

Prepare deploy account

This should be similar to "Create deploy account" section from Setup and deploy Rails app with Capistrano.

Install Ruby & Rails dependencies

These are mostly copied from Setup and deploy Rails app with Capistrano with some updates. Note that these are for Ubuntu server.

# Update package index
sudo apt-get update

# Install curl
sudo apt-get install curl

# install RVM
gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 409B6B1796C275462A1703113804BB82D39DC0E3 7D2BAF1CF37B13E2069D6956105BD0E739499BDB
curl -sSL <https://get.rvm.io> | bash -s stable
echo "source $HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm # activate RVM
rvm requirements # install dependencies

# Install Ruby 3.2.2 and bundler
rvm install 3.2.2
rvm use 3.2.2 --default
gem install bundler -v 2.5.3 -V

# Install git
sudo apt-get install git-core

# Install database engine based on your project
sudo apt-get install mysql-server
sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-contrib libpq-dev

# Install nvm to manage node versions
curl -o- <https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.7/install.sh> | bash
nvm install 20

# Install yarn
npm install --global yarn

# Install nginx
sudo apt-get install nginx

# Others
sudo apt-get install redis-server
sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Install mina

Just install mina gem

gem install mina

Run mina init to create config/deploy.rb. All deployment code will be here.

The first step is go to config/deploy.rb to make changes to basic information like remote server IP, remote server user, application name, git repo, etc...

It rarely works out of the box as we always have various custom needs like using Puma for application server, RVM to manage Ruby versions and so on. The following sections will deal with setup for common extensions.