Production Rails

Best practices for running Rails in production.

Disclaimer: 💎 = one of my gems

Security

Everyone writing code must be responsible for security. Best practices

Analytics

Use an analytics service like Google Analytics or Mixpanel.

And possibly an open source library like Ahoy. 💎

Logging

Use Lograge.

gem 'lograge'

Add the following to config/environments/production.rb.

config.lograge.enabled = true
config.lograge.custom_options = lambda do |event|
  options = event.payload.slice(:request_id, :user_id, :visit_id)
  options[:params] = event.payload[:params].except("controller", "action")
  options
end

Add the following to app/controllers/application_controller.rb.

def append_info_to_payload(payload)
  super
  payload[:request_id] = request.uuid
  payload[:user_id] = current_user.id if current_user
  payload[:visit_id] = ahoy.visit_id # if you use Ahoy
end

Audits

Use an auditing library like Audited.

Monitoring

• There are two important metrics to track for web servers
• Use an error reporting service like Rollbar
• Use an uptime monitoring service like Pingdom or Uptime Robot - monitor web servers, background jobs, and scheduled tasks
• Use a performance monitoring service like New Relic or AppSignal

What to Monitor

Web Requests

• requests by action - total time, count
• queue time - X-Request-Start header

Background Jobs and Rake Tasks

• jobs by type - total time, count

Data Stores - Database, Elasticsearch, Redis

• requests by type - total time, count
• CPU usage
• space

External Services

• requests by type - total time, count

Notable Events

Use Notable to track notable requests and background jobs. 💎

• errors
• slow requests, jobs, and timeouts
• 404s
• validation failures
• CSRF failures
• unpermitted parameters
• blocked and throttled requests

Timeouts

Use Slowpoke for request and database timeouts. 💎

Performance

• Use a high performance web server like Unicorn
• Use Rack::Deflater for compression
• Add Oj to speed up JSON parsing
• Use Memcached for caching

Development Bonus

Fix double logging in the Rails console. Create config/initializers/log_once.rb with:

ActiveSupport::Logger.class_eval do
  def self.broadcast(logger)
    Module.new do
    end
  end
end

Lastly...

Have suggestions? Let me know