WestHost Rails application deployment — Why is this hard?

I’ve written a tidy little app in Rails for work, and need to deploy it to our server. It’s really a basic program so using svn and Capistrano and all that seems like overkill. I just want to upload the folder where I did development locally on my Mac, and have it run on WestHost’s Rails installation. I do, however, want it to be in it’s own separate path, because I anticipate more programs coming along in the future.

I’ve been trying to get this to work for a week, and nothing is working the way it should be. I’ve added the Alias directive in httpd.conf to get it to see the new application directory, but after that, things just fall apart. Why is this so hard? Why does it seem that each hosting provider does this in a different way? This is frustrating.

So, in the full OSS spirit, as soon as I get this figured out, I’ll post my discoveries here to the blog. I hope that it will spare others some of the pain I’m going through at the moment.

Wish me luck!