---
title: SwitchTower Gotchas
teaser: How to work around some common SwitchTower deployment problems.
tags: web,rails
author: Matt Jankowski
published_on: 2006-12-21
---

If you're using SwitchTower to deploy your Rails apps (it's fun!), you might run
into these errors:

* A Net::SSH authorization issue
* Problems running the reaper, spinner or spawner scripts

The problems causing these errors are:

* A host you are trying to deploy to is prompting you to confirm it's ssh
  identify because you haven't yet (and switchtower is choking on this)
* The `PATH` of the user you are deploying as on a remote server doesn't have
  ruby in it's path

You can correct these problems by:

* Connect via <abbr title="Secure Shell">SSH</abbr> once manually to each server
  you are deploying to—which will add the remote host to your local list of
  allowed hosts, removing the prompting that breaks ST.
* Change the first line in each of the script/process scripts to be the direct
  path to ruby on the deployment servers. Alternately, you could add the path to
  ruby to the user's environment `PATH` on the remote server—but I think putting
  it directly in the script/process files is better since cron jobs don't have
  `PATH` info and you could conceivably run those (especially the spinner) from
  a cron task.

Enjoy your deploying!