Deploying Ruby on Rails on Bluehost

Question

Does anyone here know how to deploy a Ruby app on Bluehost? I am having quite a problem with this. Everytime I put my files inside the folder where my domain is pointing at, it always giving me a 403 error when I try to visit the website.

What ruby server are you running? My guess is that you aren't, but without more information it is difficult to help you. — sosborn, Aug 19 '13 at 03:11

score 8 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:47

It's so painful. The instructions are incomplete. There are a bunch of things to get caught on like broken versions of sass, assets not pre-compiling, database configuring, how to restart the server, the root directory for passenger, etc. I had problems with all of those things. I had to come here (Stack Overflow) to find most of the answers. My site still runs in dev but not in production. The BH support is not much help. THey should call it BlueWordPressHost because that is who they are supporting.

Look in the <rails_root>/log directory for clues.

I'm not willing to switch over to Heroku and use postgres, I tried it but in reality your just dealing with another set of problems setting it up.

Mini John · Answer 2 · 2014-03-03T18:46:29.287

5

Give it a look -> Ruby on Rails Setup with Bluehost. You cant just drop your Files in a folder.

Although Bluehost does a great job, i recommend you using Heroku for deploying Ruby on Rails Apps.

Deploying with Heroku is quite Easy -> Deploying with Git

edited Mar 03 '14 at 18:46

answered Aug 19 '13 at 03:13

Mini John

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definitely second *not* recommending bluehost for rails [I did it by installing a custom ruby instance but gave up eventually for performance reasons: http://betterlogic.com/roger/2013/06/goodbye-bluehost-for-rails ] – rogerdpack Apr 09 '14 at 22:47

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:30

I followed the instructions in the Ruby on Rails Setup as The Mini John referenced and it worked. They use Phusion Passenger to allow you to deploy any rack based application. However, I did have to manually install my gem dependencies. This is probably not a scalable solution for a production application with many users. However, if you already have bluehost as a hosting provider and are willing to maintain your own server and deal with possible latency issues and downtime, it may be worth it for you. Here is my Ruby on Rails 4.0 "Hello World" application deployed to bluehost: http://hello.getplanit.com.

Deploying Ruby on Rails on Bluehost

3 Answers3

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