Big Rock Software

Recently, I have been dabbling in the Ruby/Rails world for the first time, and as a newcomer there’s lots of new information from many different sources that I thought I would put together for other newbies.  After much research and head scratching this is the Rails stack that I’ve come up with, minus the database, that will be next. I hopeful this setup will be a rock solid solution, and from what I’ve Googled around it at least appears to consist of proven frameworks and technologies.

Here are the technologies I have chosen:

• Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick)
• RVM 1.1.8
• nginx 0.8.54
• Phusion Passenger 3.0.2
• Ruby 1.9.2 p136
• Rails 3.0.3

So let me explain a bit about why I chose each item in the list above. I chose Ubuntu as the OS because I want more Unix/Linux experience, seems to be one of the more popular Linux distros out there and its the Linux OS that I have the most familiarity with. Next is Ruby/Rails, I chose the latest versions of each because even though I don’t have a specific application in mind to build yet, I might as well spend my time learning the latest and greatest today so if and when I do build my next app in Rails, those versions will be the norm. Moving on, I kind of stumbled onto RVM during my research and glad I did. I love it’s ease of use, ability to setup multiple environments without worrying about version conflicts, and it’s integration with Capistrano (future blog post). Nginx is light-weight, both in features and memory utilization, fast, I like the configuration syntax and seems to be gaining popularity. Lastly, Phusion Passenger was chosen because it’s recommended here on rubyonrails.org.

So lets get started and put the pieces together.

Setup a new user account.

Create a new user account, change the password and then add the new user account to sudoers file. The rails application will run as this user.

$ sudo useradd -s /bin/bash -m app-user   		# add user
$ sudo passwd app-user					# change password
$ sudo /usr/sbin/visudo					# edit sudoers file

# Add line below just below 'root ALL=(ALL) ALL':
app-user ALL=(ALL) ALL

From here on out we’ll be executing the installation as this user.

$ su app-user

Install RVM

Install the dependencies needed for RVM and then install.

$ sudo apt-get install git curl build-essential vim libcurl4-openssl-dev
$ bash < <( curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head )

Brilliant! Can’t get any easier than this.

 
Update ~/.bashrc file (remember this is the app-user’s .bashrc file).

$ vim ~/.bashrc

# This snippet should placed at the end of the .bashrc file.
[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"  # This loads RVM into a shell session.

Exit as app-user and then su app-user again to load rvm into the shell session.

Install Ruby prequisites

Double-check what the Ruby dependencies are using:

$ rvm notes

Install the dependencies

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential bison openssl libreadline6 libreadline6-dev \
		curl git-core zlib1g zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev \
		sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt-dev autoconf

Install Ruby

Install Ruby using rvm.

$ rvm package install zlib
$ rvm package install openssl
$ rvm install 1.9.2 --with-zlib-dir=$rvm_path/usr --with-openssl-dir=$rvm_path/usr

Create GemSet

$ rvm --create use 1.9.2@myapplication
$ rvm --default use 1.9.2@myapplication
$ ruby -v  # test it

Install Phusion Passenger

$ gem install passenger

Install nginx using the passenger installer

Download and then extract nginx source, remember this location. The passenger installer can download it for you as part of option 1 during the install, but I chose option 2 so that I can supply extra arguments to the nginx installer.

$ wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-0.8.54.tar.gz
$ tar xvf nginx-0.8.54.tar.gz
$ rvmsudo passenger-install-nginx-module  # rvmsudo is required in order to install nginx to /opt/nginx

Create an Upstart job to start nginx at boot time. Create a new file /etc/init/nginx.conf and then add the following:

$ sudo vim /etc/init/nginx.conf

The complete contents of the nginx.conf file are:

	description "Nginx HTTP Server"

	start on filesystem
	stop on runlevel [!2345]

	respawn

	exec /opt/nginx/sbin/nginx -g "daemon off;"

Next, we’ll want to restart to verify our upstart script works.

$ sudo shutdown -r now

Verify nginx is up and running

$ sudo initctl list | grep nginx

You should see:

nginx start/running, process 678

…Or use a browser and visit http://localhost

Install Rails 3

su back in with app-user if you’re not already.

$ gem install rails --version 3.0.3

Create a sample rails application to verify our setup

$ sudo mkdir /rails_apps
$ sudo chown app-user:app-user /rails_apps
$ cd /rails_apps

$ rails new myapplication
$ cd /rails_apps/myapplication
$ bundle install
$ rails generate scaffold Post name:string title:string content:text
$ RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate

Configure your rails app to work with nginx/passenger

Open nginx.conf to configure nginx

$ sudo vim /opt/nginx/conf/nginx.conf

Change the second line for the user to ‘app-user’

You will then need to add a server block looking similar to this:

	server {
	listen 80;
	server_name localhost;
	root /rails_apps/myapplication/public;   # <--- be sure to point to 'public'!
	passenger_enabled on;
	}

Restart nginx once again

$ sudo service nginx restart

Use a browser to test app

You will most likely see an error in /www/my-application/log/production.log that says something like “attempt to write a readonly database”. You will need to figure out your permissions with the /my-application/db/production.sqlite3 directory and file. However, if you’re rails app is configured to use a different rdms other than SQLite like MySQL of PostgreSQL, this will probably won’t be an issue.

References:

• Phusion Passenger users guide, Nginx version
• RVM
• Setting up Rails 3 on Rackspace Cloud Servers
• How can I start nginx via upstart ?