title: How to deploy a Rails app to Dreamhost?
body: <p>I'm kind of lost, I try to deploy my application on a shared dreamhost server.
  Now everything works fine locally. It's my first try at Rails, and I'm not really a programmer or sysadmin, just hacking something together.</p>
  
  <p>On Dreamhost, if I start webrick, it works fine on port 3000, but webricks gets killed pretty quickly, I guess that makes sense.</p>
  
  <p>So what do I have to do to make it run?</p>
  
  <p>I enabled fastcgi support and mod_rails.</p>
  
  <p>Now, how do I get the app constantly running?</p>
  
  <p>I keep reading about having to do things to .htaccess and to dispatch.fcgi.</p>
  
  <p>But I can't find any dispatch file in my rails app (2.3.2).</p>
  
  <p>Do I have to create that one manually? Doesn't really feeld very rails-like to me. I didn't really manage to find out what this dispatch file does, and why it's needed.</p>
  
  <p>Any help would be greatly appreciated.</p>
  
  <p>I looked at the DH Wiki, but couldn't figure it out (<a href="http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Rails" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Rails</a>)</p>
  
  <p><strong>Additions</strong>:</p>
  
  <p>I enabled mod_rails and pointed to the public directory (I had already done that).
  I keep getting an error: screencast.com/t/KamqVawk</p>
  
  <p>Hm, server logs look like there is actually no request, so this might be a problem on dreamhosts end. It's strange I see that the access.log show a new change date, when I try to access the page, but there is no request noted, error.log is empty too.</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://content.screencast.com/users/RolandStuder/folders/Jing/media/0690b68d-29f9-4679-8eb4-3604c386fd57/00000139.png" alt="screenshot of configuration"></p>
  
  <p><strong>Dreamhost Support Answer</strong>:</p>
  
  <p>The server was up to date, so that wasn't the problem.
  They proposed freezing the Gems, which I did (see:  <a href="http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Freezing_Gems" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Freezing_Gems</a>)
  But it didn't help.
  I guess I'm giving up, and looking into hosting which is specialized for rails.</p>
  
  <p>Thx for all your help!</p>
  
  <p><strong>Changed to hostingrails.com</strong></p>
  
  <p>I got the app working on hostingrails.com, passenger on hostingrails.com showed me errors, which weren't shown by dreamhost or mongrel. By correcting these errors, I got the app working.</p>