Rubber can be installed as a rubygem (recommended) or as a plugin into your rails project. Once installed, you need to vulcanize your project by running rubber’s vulcanize generator to add a basic set of configuration files to your project.

sudo gem install rubber
./script/generate vulcanize complete_passenger_mysql

or for a Rails 3 project, or a non-rails project, use the convenient script bundled with the rubber gem:

rubber vulcanize complete_passenger_mysql

The vulcanize generator follows a mixin model. You can choose to generate a complete deployment scenario like “complete_passenger_mysql”, or you can start with the “base” or “mysql_minimal” generator and mixin in the modules you want for your needs. The goal here is to get people to contribute generators so that we all don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time we need to come up with a deployment environment. For example,

./script/generate vulcanize mysql_minimal
./script/generate vulcanize monit

to setup a minimal mysql setup (a stack made up of mysql, mongrel and nginx), and add in monit for making sure your components stay running.

Each component/stack will install a set of transformable config files, a rubber-module.yml file for configuring their transformation, and a deploy-module.rb file for doing the right thing for that module during deployment. I try to ensure that all components have the same defaults so they will work out of the box, but you’ll still want to peruse the files they generate to customize their behavior.

Edit config/rubber/rubber*.yml to add your settings. You can edit or add to the config files in RAILS_ROOT/config/rubber/<common|role|host> to transform those config files globally for all instances or for specific roles and/or hosts.

You may also want to customize config/deploy.rb for your needs. The deployment scripts in config/deploy-MODULE.yml contain MODULE specific (mongrel, nginx, etc) scripts for deploying those pieces of your setup.

To test that your transformations all work before deploying, you can run “cap rubber:config” in a development env. This will transform all your rubber config files into RAILS_ROOT/tmp/rubber as if it were “/” on your remote servers.