How to access Rails WEBrick running on a VPS - ruby-on-rails

I'm fairly new to Rails and VPS. I created a SSH tunnel and managed to install Ruby/Rails, then I created a simple scaffolding app to play around. One question now coming up is, how I can access the running WEBrick server via my browser? I tried the IP of my VPS and added XXX.XXX.XXX.XX:3000 as the port. But for some reason it does not work. Any idea? Thanks

Try port 80 as 3000 can be quite sensitive to firewalls and certain ISP's

Related

run rails app with an ubuntu server with global ip

Currently, we are running our rails app, on AWS but we tried to move it to Heroku, which didn't work at all, now We are trying to run the app on Virtual Machine on hetzner. I can run the app on local server easily, my question is that, How can we run our rails app with a specific IP and then we can access that app anywhere in the world from that ip? is that possible to do so? We are using PUMA for server.
Yes, you can access to to your site with specific IP.
In description of hetzner Virtual Server says that server have 1 specific IP. So than you deployed and run you application y can access to app with 1.1.1.1:80 or another port.
If i understand you. Also what happened with heroku?

What is localhost:8000 as used in Codecademy (for AngularJS and Ruby on Rails tutorials)?

I want to know what is this: localhost:8000, found in Codecademy tutorials for AngularJS and Ruby on Rails. I even installed Apache 2, but to work with it I need to dial: http://localhost/. While working on some html files, I often come across Firefox's Inspect Element where a section is to mention localhost and its number like this: localhost:8000. I want to know what's this and can I use it to access my host from my android device or some other PC as we do access Codecademy's localhost to learn AngularJS and Ruby on Rails. Pls help. Thanks in advance. :-)
Localhost is the loopback-address of your pc. The IP-address behind it is 127.0.0.1. With localhost, it is possible to simulate a web-server environment and it is mostly used to simulate running web-applications as if they are running on a webserver. :8000 stands for the port-number on which the browser connects to the server. This is because the application runs (in this case) on port 8000 of the server. So it is not enough to just install Apache 2 and surf to http://localhost/ you have to configure Apache so that it runs your web-application on the desired port. The port-number itself has no special meaning. The different ports are just a part of the url so the browser knows on which port it has to connect. Some protocols use default ports. (e.g. HTTP will always connect to port 80, unless your specify another port in your webbrowser)
I'm sure a lot of people can explain it much better, but here is a begin.
More info about running ruby on rails on an Apache webserver:
How can i run a ruby on rails project on apache server?
How to setup Ruby on Rails Hosting using Apache, from Development to Production
EDIT: Technically, the whole 127.0.0.0/8 address block is reserved for loopback purposes. The default one, configurged in hosts.txt is 127.0.0.1 and the most famous.

Domain setting using ruby rails

I am planning to have a web application.
To do so, I studied about ruby and ruby on rails. I am using linux server from amazon clouding system.
I bought a domain from godday, and I put the IP address on DNS setting. When I run 'rails s' command, I can connect to the wep page through port 3000 in such a way that domain.com:3000. However, I cannot directly connect to domain.com. How can I my domain works without port 3000?
And Do I have to run 'rails s' every time to make the wep page work? Actually I tried to use 'rails s &' to make it run in background. But it fails. How can I make the server run even though I am not connected to the linux server?
Thank you!
usually you use rails s just in development. there are quite a few ruby web servers you can choose from for your production environment: puma, passenger or unicorn to name a few.
of course all of them have their own tutorials how to set them up. for starters, i'd go with with passenger because it's integrated with nginx and apache and easily set up.
You need to specify a port, if you don't see the port it can be either 80 (http) or 443 (https).
rails server -p 80
On linux you have to be root to bind to port less than 1000, so just append sudo in front.

How do I make my ruby on rails app respond to external requests (visible to the public on the internet)?

Problem:
My rails app (on my local machine) only responds to requests sent from the same machine to localhost, 127.0.0.1, or my internal ip address. When I try to hit it using my internet ip or from any other machine, inside or outside of my network, it just times out. I'm on Mac OS 10.9.1, ruby 1.9.3, rails 4.0.0.
I've done a lot of searching but all I can find is problems where people didn't forward their ports or bind the right ip.
Here are the areas I've investigated:
Ports -
I've tried several different ports. I configured my router to forward every port I tried but got the same result. I thought maybe there was a problem with the router so I built a simple server in Java and bound all the same ports I was binding with my rails app. Sure enough, when I hit the Java app using my internet ip it worked just fine so the router/firewall/port forwarding isn't the problem. Also, I run an apache server on port 80 and that has never had any problems. I turned apache off and tried port 80 for my rails app but that didn't fix the problem.
Rails Server -
I started with WEBrick and I thought that perhaps there was some setting inside that blocked external requests. I searched google extensively and found nothing on that matter. Just to be safe I installed Thin and got the exact same result I did with WEBrick. One interesting thing is that when the rails server is started, the external request takes a long time to time-out, but the server console displays no output at all. However if I try to send the same request w/out starting the server at all it fails immediately.
User Permissions -
I started the server with root (i'm starting to just shoot in the dark here) and it had no effect.
Environment -
I was starting in development environment originally because I'm developing but just for fun I tried starting in production and it also made no difference.
PLEASE HELP ME SMART PEOPLE
Update:
I installed the app on my Ubuntu machine and it doesn't have this problem! So that suggests the problem may have something to do with Mac OS.
SOLVED:
It turns out that in the System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Firewall in Mac OS, it was somehow set to block incoming connections to Ruby 1.9.3. I must have accidentally set that some time ago.
The problem is you are probably trying to request the page from your local machine (or any computer on your local network, behind your firewall) to your public IP expecting a result... not unless you setup routes through your firewall for this (and not usually available on a consumer level router... linksys, dlink, etc)
So forward port 80 if you are using something like pow, or 3000 for web bricks default port to your local machine
Then have someone outside your local lan request your external (public) IP
This may be related: Rails 3.1 on Ubuntu 11.10 under VirtualBox very slow
Your mention of slowness combined with the use of webrick makes me think you've got some reverse-DNS lookup awfulness going on. A quick first step is hacking /etc/hosts to bypass this lookup.
The situation I dealt with on Ubuntu was solved in the short-term by hacking /etc/hosts. You could do this quick hack in order to see if it is indeed just webrick's reverse-DNS lookup. Edit /etc/hosts and add a line for the external user's IP address, something like this:
156.123.48.55 TestPerson
Replace the IP address with the tester's IP address. Since you said you can get the external request to hit an Apache server on port 80, you can grab their IP address from the Apache access logs if necessary, otherwise just ask the person testing.
You could also try a different web server, such as unicorn, which may help out. Add "gem unicorn-rails" to your Gemfile, run bundle install, and then (according to their docs), rails server will just use unicorn directly.
With any local server, you'll need to correctly configure port forwarding on your firewall. Like said by CaptChrisD, tests must be done by an external IP/browser (if you own a server, ssh on it, then w3m to test).
I already had same symptom (server started => timeout, server stopped => fail) and the origin was an issue with firewall configuration. I think it is your problem.
With MacOS, Pow is really awesome: installation is easy, no configuration required (no /etc/hosts…). Moreover, they give you a hook for external access to your virtualhosts (but you still need port forwarding on your firewall).
Otherwise, there is other solutions like Forward to do it without firewall configuration (30-days free trial).
Hope this helps!

Starting Rails server on boot on CentOS

I'm pretty new to rails and trying to figure things out, I looked online but not much luck.
I have some servers that are running rails on startup without using rc.local at all, but I can't figure out why.
All I need is for rails to start on boot in production mode on port 80 (instead of 3000, as the rest of the servers also start on port 80).
Any ideas?
ATM relaying on webrick
Have a look at setting up nginx with ruby enterprise edition.
Check out Phusion Passenger. It supports both the standard Apache web server and Nginx web server.
http://www.modrails.com/

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