Production Rails

Best practices for running Rails in production.

In the interest of transparency, 💎 indicates 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.

Errors

Use an error reporting service like Rollbar.

Use Safely to rescue and report exceptions in non-critical code. 💎

Monitoring

There are two important metrics to track for web servers
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
If you use Postgres, PgHero can help identify issues 💎
Use Marginalia to track the origin of SQL queries