FAQ

Why won’t rubber connect to my ec2 instance?

Note that capistrano needs both a public and private key file in the same directory in order to connect when setting the rubber config option for ec2_key_file (which should point to the private key file). You should have got the private key when you created a ec2 keypair during the ec2 install/setup (See Requirements). You can get the public key in one of two ways:

1. Create the pubic key from the private key: ssh-keygen -y -f gsg-keypair > gsg-keypair.pub
2. Create an instance and ssh into it to grab the file at /mnt/openssh_id.pub

Alternatively, one can leave ec2_key_file unset and use ssh-add or edit ~/.ssh/config to add your ec2 key to the set used to authenticate with.

Rubber looks nice, but its not quite what I need, are there any alternatives?

If you can’t tweak rubber to meet your needs, then there are alternatives:

• Free
  • EC2 on Rails
  • rubyworks-ec2 (docs)
  • Elastic Rails
  • PoolParty
  • scalr
• Commercial
  • RightScale
  • Heroku
  • EngineYard
  • Morph Labs

For the free alternatives, aside from poolparty, the main difference to rubber is that rubber was built from the ground-up to support deploying to multiple instances, and has a very flexible mechanism for configuring said instances at a host, role or global level.

What other tools are there for EC2?

• cloudclick is a commercial but free web monitoring/management service for ec2 instances.