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Integrating Zeus ZXTM Load Balancer and Capistrano for Ruby on Rails websites

At TouchLocal, one of the difficulties in automating deployment was the tight coupling between the app servers that were currently running and what the Load Balancer said was running. The implication of this is that at deployment time a human had to go into the ZXTM interface and update the list of running nodes before and afterwards. To ease this, and allow fully automatic deployment of Ruby on Rails apps running under Phusion Passenger, I built the ZXTMManager class.

This class implements an interface to the Zeus ZXTM API, allowing (in its current state) the ability to programatically change active nodes and manage other details of the commonly changed data in the Load Balancer. On top of that, there is an included deploy.rb file that shows the deployment recipes that can be simply and easily added to your own Capistrano configuration to use this class quickly and easily.

Enjoy.