Devise VS Capistrano

Since Rails 7, there's more and more tooling that enables us, developers, to roll our own authentication. Devise is great and has been an amazing companion over the years. It also has this neat little feature - an authenticated route constraint which "hides" certain routes from people that are not signed in.

[changelog] https://github.com/heartcombo/devise/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md [upgrade guide] https://github.com/heartcombo/devise/wiki/How-To:-Upgrade-to-Devise-4.9.0-%5BHotwire-Turbo-integration%5D

As much as this article is about user authorization, there's something important we need to cover: user authentication. Without it, any authorization policies we try to define later on will be useless. But there is no need to write authentication from scratch. Let's use Devise.

With around 50 new gems released daily, it is common to use trending libraries for managing everyday tasks. You probably use Devise for authentication, Cancan for authorization, Kaminari for pagination, or run tests with Rspec.

Devise is an authentication library built on top of Warden, a Rack-based authentication framework.

devise: An authentication library designed for Rails

I used Devise, this is a Ruby on Rails app

In this article, we will explore how to implement authentication in a Rails 7 application using the popular devise gem. Authentication is a crucial aspect of web development, allowing users to securely access and interact with your application. By following this step-by-step guide, you will learn how to set up devise, configure authentication routes, create user models, and enhance your application with authentication features.

If you don't want to go down the NFS share route then Capistrano is a useful tool if you're willing to write a little bit of ruby. It comes with some built in goodies like rollbacks. It's an oldie (pre-dockerize everything), but still useful.

https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano

You can start by deploying from your machine to simultaneously get it deploying across all your servers, then I'd consider having a CI/CD pipeline take over and run Capistrano for you.

- Integrate automation deployment: [capistrano](https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano)

Integrate automation deployment: capistrano

The deployment process generally includes making the new version available, directing traffic from the old to the new version, and stopping the old versions. Capistrano has been doing this since 2006. However, what makes Kubernetes deployments better is the minimum number of pods required, and its rollout strategy minimizes or eliminates downtime. For example, a rolling update strategy can ensure new pods gradually replace old pods with configs like maxSurge and maxUnavailable. Because this is done in a declarative way, as a user or operator, you only need to ask Kubernetes to apply a given deployment and Kubernetes does the rest. Next up is the Kubernetes config map.

[1] https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano

Capistrano

What I had considered was writing a deployment script where upon successful build in a separate folder, it'd swap out the deployed folder, similar to how Capistrano works. It has a "current" folder and it'll build in a temporary folder and then replace the symlink to a newer build.

capistrano with plugins for deployment

deployer is a deployment tool written in PHP. It comes with "Zero Downtime Deployments" out of the box and can be extended by writing simple PHP code. (capistrano would be the equivalent in the Ruby world).

Capistrano, if you like Ruby.