ok i figured it out

1. make sure to create /home/index.html and point your route there before you push to git
2. install git apt-get install git
3. ssh to your digitalocean domain
4. navigate to cd /home/rails
5. delete folder rails
6. clone your rails repo from github git clone YOUR_REMOTE_ADDRESS
7. rename the downloaded repo to rails
8. setup your db rake db:drop db:create db:migrate
9. run rails server like so rails s --binding=YOUR_IP_ADDRESS

I was running rails s for the past few days wondering why it is just showing the default “digitalocean rails page”

anyways, i hope this could help someone in the future.