Apologies for these stupid questions (please explain why if you're going to downvote).
I have a site running on a LAMP stack on a Linode Ubuntu VPS and want to learn rails on the remote server without causing disruption to the site currently at mydomain.com.
1) Can I install rails the normal way (as I would on my own PC), and have it not effect the site that is currently up?
2) If a generate an app skeleton after installation, after starting the rails server, how can I navigate the default view?
1) Your test Rails app and the production PHP app can co-exist (hopefully you know your way around Linux) on the same server without interfering with each other. However, I would not recommend this. Bad idea to be trying experimental stuff on production VMs/VPSs. You are better off spooling a test VPS for Rails or better still use VirtualBox VMs on your local machine.
2) Rails apps start on port 3000 by default. So on the VPS, you can reach the Rails app root at http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:3000 (replace the x's with your VPS's IP addr.)
Related
I have a rails application that is currently hosted on Heroku. It is used on our local network only, and my boss does not want a 3rd party hosting our data. I convinced IT to set me up a virtual windows server to deploy my app on. However, it has been very difficult to set up for production.
Is there anyway that I can use a hosting service for my application, but have the database reside on our local network?
Or is there an easier way to deploy a rails app on a windows server? I have been looking into using the Linux Subsystem for Windows.
If your app is used on your local network only, why not ditch Heroku and host your Rails app locally as well? What benefit is a scalable cloud hosting provider giving you? Especially since it seems your boss has security concerns about remote hosting of a database. Bringing the entire thing in house may be the best solution.
Simple answer is yes you can, but why would you. It's simpler to run your application locally than connecting your remote app to a local database.
Your best bet is to use a Linux virtual machine instead of Windows, usually there is to much hassle to get rails application to work on windows, especially compiling native gems.
I suggest that you get a CentOS VM, and install Nginx with passenger gem using rbenv or rvm.
Digital Ocean has a nice guide that explains this process in details:
How To Deploy Rails Apps Using Passenger With Nginx on CentOS 6.5
Yes I know there's not much support for deploying Rails apps in Windows but this is a requirement. I've searched online for hours looking for a solution to no avail! I don't need to use any particular server just anyway to get my app viewable on the company intranet.
I installed the WAMR (Windows, Apache, MySQL, Ruby) stack using the BitNami rubystack 1.9.3 installer. I can see my app using the WEBrick dev server just fine in localhost. I can even see the BitNami Welcome screen (index.html) when pointing to my Windows VM IP address from another computer on the intranet, but I can't figure out how to push the Rails app itself to production so that all other intranet computers can see it. Any solution would be appreciated! The server doesn't have to be Apache.
Thanks!
Quick and easy way to deploy a rails app on windows?
I would recommend virtualbox to run a linux virtual machine. Install vagrant and you'll be able to fully automate the download of the linux image and rails provisioning using tools like chef or puppet.
I am new to Ruby on Rails. I have been working as junior developer and most of time working on localhost so don't know how to launch Ruby on rails application, How to Configure Ruby on rails application and how to deploy it.
often I came accross following terms but don't know It's meaning and how to use them and where to use them.
Apache
Phusion Passenger
Heroku
nginx
Please Help me and also looking forward to any good tutorial to learn all that terms.
Thanks.
I think there is quite a lot of resources on the web for this, but :
Heroku is a platform as a service. Basically, you push your rails app to a git remote, and that's it, deployed. You can manage addons, workers, and processes from CLI, and scale up/down if you need. Probably the most painless way to start with.
Apache & nginx are two werbservers, I'd say they are the most common in the rails world. Nginx is the latest of the two and it seems to be better for most of the tasks, but if you want to know which to choose, there is several posts on the internet for that too.
Phusion passenger is the bridge (or one of the available bridges) between your rails app and your webserver. If you've done php before, think of it as mod_php.
Since this is all new to you I'd advise that you start with hosting on Heroku. You can do a lot with the free version and it's arguably the easiest way to get started with hosting your rails website. Check out the getting started guide from Heroku. There's also another beginners guide here.
Once you feel comfortable with Heroku your next step could be looking into hosting on your own virtual private server (VPS). The setup is much more manual but things that would cost extra money on Heroku are now free if you set it up yourself on your VPS. Here is a great article on VPS hosting.
For reference, I was hosting websites on Heroku for about a year before I started looking into hosting on my own VPS. Now what I do is start by hosting my projects on Heroku since it's the fastest way to get up and running. Then if the website is successful I transition to a VPS.
I have a simple Ruby on Rails application that works through a localhost test (both using sqlite, or ruby mysql2 gem).
I have a web server ready to upload my app online.
I understand that I need to create a new mysql database, which is no problem, and obviously add the connect info in the database.yml, but how do I propertly upload the whole thing (app root) to a public dir of my site?
Rails itself contains a few links to get you started with deployment. I was in your boat a while ago, and I got started with Passenger and Apache within half an hour (although I did have some light Apache experience going in).
Get started just to prove to yourself you can do it
Not that it's a good idea, but the balls to the wall easiest way to "deploy" is the following (assuming you've already pulled your application into your deployment environment, created your database, and run rake db:migrate and any application-specific steps like bundle install on Rails 3):
rails server -p 80 on Rails 3 (./script/server -p 80 on Rails 2).
There is no step 2.
This has to be run on a machine for which you have administrative rights and for which port 80 is not already being listened to by another application. This is suboptimal in many ways, most apparent of which is that it won't allow for virtual hosting (i.e., it won't cooperate with other "websites" being run from that server), but it's a good baby step to dip your feet into.
Go to the machine's FQDN or in fact any hostname that resolves to the machine's IP address (via a hosts file or an A record), and you'll see your application.
Now do it properly
You're going to want to do the following to bring your application "up to speed":
Deploy it behind a virtual host behind a webserver application like Apache
Use a production-oriented deployment setup (WEBrick's single-threadedness, among other factors, make it unsuitable for production)
Actually use the "production" rails environment
I'll be recommending a very, very typical Apache/Passenger deployment environment. The reason is that (at least it seems to me) this particular stack is the most thoroughly supported across the Internet, so if you need to get help, you'll have the easiest time with this.
1. Set up Apache
I don't want to sound like a tool, but setting up Apache (if it's not already set up on your deployment environment) is left as an exercise for the reader. It also varies enough across platforms that I couldn't possible write a catchall guide. Coarsely, use your distribution's package manager (for Ubuntu, this is apt-get) to get it hooked up.
2. Set up Passenger
Passenger installation is even easier. You just run one command, and their guide runs you through all the steps. At this point, in your Rails application root, you'll be able to run passenger start instead of rails s to have Passenger fill the role that WEBrick once did.
3. Hook up Passenger with Apache
The Passenger guide fairly thoroughly documents, step by step, how to set it all up. The ServerName attribute in Apache's VirtualHost entry should be set to your hostname. Passenger will "find" the Rails application from the public directory you give Apache, and when you restart Apache, the first time the server gets a request for a page, Passenger will hook up your Rails application and start serving up files.
I'm not performing these steps as I'm writing this guide, so I'm not sure to what extent this is done automatically, but make sure that the site is enabled via a2ensite (in the case that you're putting this VirtualHost node in the sites-available directory) and that Passenger is enabled via a2enmod.
Make sure your production environment is ready
This is likely to be the first time you're using the production environment. Most rake tasks don't automatically act on the production environment, but you can conveniently force them to by including RAILS_ENV=production inline with any rake tasks. The one you'll very likely be running is rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production. The bundler in Rails 3 works independently of environment.
5. Go
Restart Apache. The specifics on how to do this will vary by distribution, so you'll have to look it up. For Ubuntu, apache2ctl restart does it for me.
Visit your hostname as you defined in ServerName, and you should be seeing your application up and running.
I've heard gems like capistrano can assist with this.
https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano
Heroku is an excellent (free) option: http://docs.heroku.com/quickstart
Also, deploying to Heroku is as easy as it gets!
i've developed small web app for personal use with Ruby on Rails. Now when i want to use it I open Terminal and run ruby script/server to run mongrel then i go to Safari and type localhost:3000 to see my app.
I'd like to have this site start automatically on startup of mac and possibly to use some other URL.. preferably just http://myapp/
I come from C#/asp.net world and don't know much about apache/mongrel stuff.
Do you know any step by step tutorial how to configure rails/mongrel/apache on mac os x leopard to work together and run after startup, please? (I have apache running, which was done just by checking checkbox in system preferences/sharing)
This page by apple should have all the information you need:
http://developer.apple.com/tools/deployonrailsleopard.html
The easiest method would be to install Passenger Phusion / mod_rails for Apache. This will allow you to use sidestep the usage of Mongrel/Thin/etc and deploy apps much like php (stick it in a folder and go).
If you want to run it on Mac OS X you can simply setup your webserver, I recommend nginx with Phusion's Passenger, and your database server to start on boot, that way whenever your computer has to restart it will have your site running. Of course if this is a laptop that will be changing networks and needs to be accessed by other people I would recommend getting a proper VPS for it, come to think of it, I would recommend that anyway if this is supposed to be a production environment.