Create and install SSL certificates with ease – a Capistrano plugin (revised) How do I generate the private key file again? Or what is the correct chaining order? Installing, or renewing SSL certificates on the web server has some pitfalls. And most of us don’t do it regularly, so it’s easy to forget the process. That’s why I created a small Capistrano 3 plugin. Continue reading →

Create Twitter Cards and LinkedIn Previews with Rails You want a nice preview when your content is shared on Twitter, LinkedIn, and other sites? That's a good idea – it looks better and people are more attracted to click. Let's build a simple solution. Continue reading →

Create a simple Sitemap with Rails and Ping it to Google with Rake You just finished that new blog post or optimized your copy. And Google should know about it. Now you can wait for Google to fetch the changes – or just ping them. We decide to ping Google. Our ingredients are a Rake task and a simple model class – this gets us rake sitemap:ping . Continue reading →

Create and install SSL certificates with ease – a Capistrano recipe How to generate the Private Key, what's the correct chaining order, or how to create a PEM Certificate? We all know it and we hate it: Installing or renewing the SSL certificates for our application. And after you finally figured it out, you'll unlearn the progress till you need it again. So I wrote a small Capistrano recipe to help you with this annoying job. (Find the revised Capistrano 3 version here.) Continue reading →

Show and tail multiple production remote logs with Capistrano Sometimes you want to see what's happening in your production log files right now. You can use log management tools like Loggly or Papertrail for this, but there is also an easy way to stream your log files with Capistrano. I found a basic implementation here and improved it a bit. Continue reading →

Run a remote Rails production console with Capistrano We all love to enter the Rails console to try out some stuff. It's just a rails c away in development. But what if you want to view or fetch some specific data on your remote production server (and you're not on Heroku)? If you already deploy your app with Capistrano, why not use it for this task? Continue reading →