I was wondering if it was possible to make a complete backup copy of a CentOS Web-server and install it on a local machine.
I am new to Ruby on Rails and find it difficult to program without erroring out the complete server. so i would like to make a seperate server that i can use for development porposes
Godaddy.com VPS ultimate server CentOS 6.4
ruby 1.9.3
RoR 3
Nginx
Postgras SQL
To test a server, using it's own operating system etc, on your own local machine, you should look into Vagrant. http://www.vagrantup.com/
There's a lot to learn, and to be honest, while you're learning, you may want to consider an easier option for deployment, such as https://www.heroku.com/ or https://ninefold.com/ and then worry about figuring out how to set up a server by yourself once you're more experienced.
If those options are too expensive, you could consider https://www.digitalocean.com/ - you can create / destroy servers easily, and if you pick their pre-built ruby on rails server (under applications tab, when you get to that step), you'll save yourself some pain.
Lastly, if you decide you really want to learn how to set up a server for rails, you should look at this book: https://leanpub.com/deploying_rails_applications
You'll save yourself a lot of time and frustration by learning it all once, properly and thoroughly, than by learning it ad-hoc by solving error after error.
But again, if you're new to rails, I'd really recommend something like Heroku to take ther server setup off your hands and let you focus on learning rails itself.
Related
is it possible to deploy a rails project to a remote server using FileZilla ? the server is running nginx/1.4.6 (ubuntu)
if no what is the best way to deploy the project if there is already a running version !
To answer your question yes, the code needs to be up, so FTP should do the trick. You might need to restart nginx to pick up the changes, usually touching a restart.txt is enough, but that's particular to your setup.
Is this the best way? Possibly not!
Others suggested capistrano and that would be a good fit for a server you maintain, or go Heroku (or similar) service for a simpler setup.
Deploying a Rails app is a tough job. There is always the easy way (heroku) however shared servers don't deal well with rails. Theoretically you can but usually this shared servers have really outdated ruby and rails versions and are absolutely useless. And you can try to connect via ssh and try to update it but i doubt you will be able to do that. So... If you are a rails developer i can suggest.
1- For small apps run Heroku (easy and free) however cost grows like hell with the app's growth
2- If you're thinking about developing big apps get a dedicated server (you can get cheap ones for 5€/month) and configure it as u would for your computer except when you run rails you run it in production.
3- Trust me... i fought enough Rails and shared servers and i quit... I just gave up
I was considering installing, setting up and using Ruby on Rails for web development. Where should I start and how does Ruby on Rails work with a local server? Any OS where Ruby on Rails is optimal or any general advice I should know?
Any OS where Ruby on Rails is optimal or any general advice I should know
Linux and Mac OS are by far the most popular dev OS's for Rails - you can install dependencies much easier.
Windows can be a real pain with Rails at first. Not rails, but its dependencies. These are called Gems and work like plugins.
Certain gems require external binaries / C headers for them to run. Two of the most notorious are the MYSQL2 and RMagick (ImageMagick) gems.
--
I don't know the core problems (it's something to do with MINGW32 / Win32 environment), but Windows often has a difficult time with certain gems.
Not that it's stopped us - we have a series of Windows machines devs use to create truly incredible RoR apps (very difficult to get them all running smoothly).
DB
You don't get a DB with your Rails install - you need to have that running separately.
If you don't want to install a local MYSQL server (which can be a pain), I'd recommend getting some cheap shared hosting (with unlimited MYSQL db's). This will allow you to hook up your app to a third party DB host, negating any data integrity issues if your dev machine has problems.
Make sure you have PHPMYAdmin too - it's a life saver :)
Although Rails with many different SQL variants, MYSQL is the most popular. Heroku has made PGSQl quite popular within the Rails community, although I'm not up to speed on the major differences.
how does Ruby on Rails work with a local server
Rails comes with its own web server for development, called WEBrick.
Honestly, WEBrick is a pile of shit but it works.
You just need to load up the cmd, type rails s and it will fire it up. If you get some more experience, you can use the likes of puma or thin as dev servers (they are much faster and better mimic the production environment)
In production, you'll be best using one of the commercial-grade servers like Apache or NGinX, good tutorial here.
Getting Started
There are a ton of tutorials to get started with Rails.
Some of the best resources are:
RailsCasts (stopped mid 2013)
GoRails (still active)
Michael Hartl Rails Tutorial
Finally, enjoy yourself. I remember the Tumblr guy saying that he got such initial traction for Tumblr through the Rails community (he said they're the most committed bunch ever). He was right, the Rails community is a big family who all love code.
Download Rails from http://railsinstaller.org
go through online tutorials and start working
it a beautiful language to work with
I am working on an open source project and there is an issue where an upload error only seems to occur on the production side that is running apache and unicorn.
Due to privacy issues and risks, I am unable to mess around in the actual production side (such as creating a temp id for myself with various privileges.
Is there anyway that I can quickly create a VM with such setup in my own computer that would mirror the live site?
The site is running in RoR 4, latest unicorn, and latest stable version of apache.
There are a couple of ways you can be able to accomplish this. You can use vagrant and also with the rising popularity of Docker containers, you can easily model production environment on your computer. Since you indicated a faster way to get the VM up and running, I would recommend using railsbox.io. Its amazing and it saves you a lot of time. According to their webiste -
Fast and easy Ruby on Rails virtual machines. Streamline your
development workflow in no time by creating production-like virtual
machine with your development environment. Try this extremely simple
to use VM configuration tool to create new Ruby on Rails server using
vagrant and ansible.
The app helps you setup a VM with ease.
After I finished reading Agile Web Development with Rails, I Have developed my own website.
Now I am trying to deploy my project on linux system I rent, but I know nothing about how to deploy rails.Which server should I user? How to connect to mysql database?
As a java developer, I know I can use tomcat as my server which can convert http request to my own object and use jdbc to connect to my mysql database.
Now I want to know what is the main stream environment rails deployed?
I have heard of Lighttpd and FCGI. Can I use them in the product environment?
thanks
Is your linux system a full VPS (you have complete control?) If not, check your hosting company to see what options are available to you. If so, check to see if they have guides for setting up Rails. A lot (Slicehost, Linode, etc.) do.
Failing that... I would recommend either Apache (or Nginx) with Passenger.
https://www.phusionpassenger.com/
It's pretty straight forward.
As for actually deploying, look into Capistrano (or Vlad). These are a little bit more complicated, but they make life so much easier in the long run.
I admit that I don't follow much of anything "right" on deploying test versus production code. I have been using ASP.NET, and I typically run it locally in Visual Studio, it works, I upload it, I test it again on the production server.
I have read several people say that deploying Rails apps is harder and there are special programs/ways on the ruby site about deploying RoR. I've only toyed with RoR. What is special about deployment? You don't just copy and paste the code and run it (from development machine to the production)? Is it because one is in Apache and the other running on the built in server?
This will be on a Mac Server if it matters.
Deploying RoR is not difficult anymore, especially with Phusion Passenger.
What is somewhat difficult, is getting a automated production environment setup with capistrano, vlad, etc. If you don't mind simply copying your code to the server, you can do that just fine. Most people choose not to do it that way because you lose out on a lot of the benefits that the automated deployment tools give you.
I guess people consider a Rails app harder to deploy than say some PHP apps or such where you just plop the code somewhere and point Apache or whatever at it. But, as mentioned above, you could do that now with Phusion Passenger.
We use Nginx+Passenger, but not for simplicity of deployment. Capistrano is our deploy tool of choice, and really, unless you have a very simple app, you're going to want something like Capistrano anyway. For example, with our deploy, we do a slew of things:
run any database migrations
generate release notes automatically, based on all the commits to Git between the last deploy and this one
notify various people via email (with differing lists depending on whether the deploy is to our staging environment or production) - we do this via cap_gun which integrates with Capistrano.
Notify New Relic RPM of the deploy so it can mark it in our RPM analysis
Notify Hoptoad of the deploy, so it too can have that data when reporting any exceptions
produce our sitemap.xml file, and ping Google to tell them there's a new one
update crontab files (I store our crontab files for each server in our git repo, and then on deploy it sees if there is a new version and updates accordingly, etc.).
flush/restart memcached
There are other ways aside from Capistrano, but it's a proven tool, with a lot of flexibility, yet pretty simple to setup a vanilla configuration.
So, my take is that once you get into any app that is beyond just the very simplest of apps, you're going to need/want to be doing things other than just simply updating the code. In the beginning though, if you just need the code updates, and maybe Rails migrations, then you can do simpler things like Passenger and code sync, or look at tools like Heroku or Engine Yard's stuff where they do a deploy by doing a Git clone (and then offer some additional abilities).
Another super easy way to deploy is with http://heroku.com/
Some of the issues you face with deploying rails to production:
Database connection.
You need to be sure that the database connector is set up for the production environment.
Database migrations.
You have to run database migrations against the production database even though you may have already run them in production/testing/staging
Ruby version. The version or sub-version or Ruby can trip you up, e.g. An error occurred while installing debugger-linecache (1.1.1), and Bundler cannot continue
Gem dependency.
Your production environment may have different packages and gems from development. Bundler will figure this out for the most part and install the dependencies but occasionally there are still issues that you have to resolve manually.
Dependencies.
Some gems on some machine have particular dependencies. I have seen frequent problems with using gems on my unix box that work on OSX and vice-versa.
Note the last 3 shouldn't affect you if on the same machine but I included them based on the title and to be comprehensive.
It's not especially hard. If you stick to conventions then with a little bit of configuration it boils down to this:
cap deploy
...however there is sometimes a bit of effort needed up front to get the workflow in place.
The good news is that lots of people have packaged up solutions and stacks for RoR that you can just plug and play. For example, google ec2onrails - this is a packaged Ubuntu image and set of capistrano tasks for running rails apps in Amazon's EC2 cloud, with lots of common stuff set up already out of the box.
Choose a good hosting provider and you should be able to find something similar for that also.
An easy way to deploy Rails apps is to use Phusion Passenger. Deployment doesn't get much easier than that for any programming language or framework. You can do that on a Mac server.
Another really easy way to deploy rails is with jruby and the glassfish gem.