// the take
A grab-bag of shell scripts for bootstrapping a Rails production box on Ubuntu 14.04 - Nginx, RVM/Ruby, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, HAProxy, Docker. Aimed at small teams in the mid-2010s who wanted to provision a VPS by hand without learning Chef or Ansible.
Each script is short and readable, so you can see exactly what it does to the box before running it (unlike a black-box provisioning tool). Good coverage of the pieces a typical Rails stack actually needed at the time - web server, cache, search, queue-adjacent services. The Ruby China mirror flag for RVM/RubyGems is a nice touch for a specific real pain point.
Everything is piped straight from git.io short links into `sudo bash` - no checksum, no pinned commit, and the shortener itself is a single point of failure/hijack risk; you're trusting a URL redirector with root on your server. Hard-pinned to Ubuntu 14.04, which has been EOL since 2019, so none of this runs cleanly on a current image without rewriting apt sources and package names. No maintenance since 2018 - versions of Nginx, MongoDB, Redis and Elasticsearch it installs are all many major versions behind and some have since changed their APT repo signing entirely. Nothing here is idempotent or reversible; re-running or partially-failed runs can leave the box in a broken state, which is exactly the class of problem Ansible/Terraform exist to solve.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →