I have been working towards deploying my rails application, and while there have been some kinks I've been able to work through most of them. The latest is quite perplexing, however.
My setup is as follows:
Ruby 1.9/Rails 3.2 App w/Phusion Passenger --> nginx on CentOS 6.2 --> Varnish cache server
Despite config.force_ssl being set to false AND being commented out in the production.rb file, the server is still forcibly redirecting to https (which is not yet functional in my case). The server has been restarted repeatedly via 'killall nginx' and '/opt/nginx/sbin/nginx', so the setting should be taking effect.
My first thought was that perhaps the cache server was lagging behind, but this isn't the case.
What makes this particularly odd, though, is that the application works fine if not put into production mode. If I edit nginx.conf to instead use development mode, the site works flawlessly.
What could be the culprit? I am very much new to this facet of server maintenance and IT so I have no idea.
Turned out that it really was varnish being over-aggressive.
Related
I'm running my Rails application through thin on Windows OS.
thin start -e production
Since the number of users grew, now around 10 people using the app simultaneously, there are times when a same page takes a while longer to load.
Are there other configurations that I need to set when running the server on production?
I'm quite sure that it has to do with the server since the slow down happens on pages that normally loads fast.
The Thin webserver is not meant to production environment. Instead of this you should use a different webserver and application server like Nginx/Unicorn, Nginx/Passenger.
I would recommend Passenger to run your rails app as fast as possible in production mode.
The thin webserver is very fast for few requests, but if there are simultaneously requests, thin gets very slow.
The following document describes about how to deploy rails application in windows. I haven't done this personally but, believe the latest versions should allow that. Please check the below link to see how it can be done
http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2006/5/11/deploying-rails-on-windows-servers/
I'm very surprised to find such little documentation on this topic which quite many developers must have faced before me.
We're changing our app to 100% HTTPS/SSL (as partial SSL doesn't make sense).
That's cool but before that, we need to migrate to it, hence to test it. Of course I found some basic information (here and here).
As I'd like my local environment to be as close as possible to the other ones in order to avoid unexpected errors, those solutions are not satisfying to me : they are ok for short time testing a feature, not more.
Here are the problems/questions I have:
Can I get a valid certificate for my local machine, to avoid the ugly warning step I can't even accept definitively on chrome?
Booting server with thin (thin start --ssl --ssl-verify --ssl-key-file server.key --ssl-cert-file server.crt), can I get same log messages as from rails server?
Can't I keep using rails server as a booting command (except by writing an dirty ALIAS ...)
Summary question is can I make a config so that it is transparent for anybody to run the instance of our app locally in https?
I mean, absolutely everything's done in rails to make development easy, and production robust, but here, there would be such a lack of good tools? I hardly can believe it ... or let's do it now!
Thanks for support! I'm using rails 3.2 with ruby 1.9.
Can I get a valid certificate for my local machine, to avoid the ugly
warning step I can't even accept definitively on chrome?
This depends if you're using the actual certificate for your domain (eg. example.com), or generating one just for development. If you are using the actual certificate from production, you could simply edit your hosts file to have example.com resolve to localhost. Then visiting https://example.com should load your Rails app.
You'll probably also need to include this in your application.rb:
config.force_ssl = true
If you're generating your own certificate you'll need to go through the motions of creating a private Certificate Authority to avoid the SSL warning in Chrome. This is a lot more work and probably not worth it.
Booting server with thin (thin start --ssl --ssl-verify --ssl-key-file
server.key --ssl-cert-file server.crt), can I get same log messages as
from rails server?
You should be able to tail -f log/development.log from the root of your Rails app.
Can't I keep using rails server as a booting command (except by
writing an dirty ALIAS ...)
This one is trickier as the server that runs when using rails s is WebBrick. You could try what's listed in this post here: Configuring WEBrick to use SSL in Rails 4
As an aside the typical setup for a Rails app is to proxy it behind say an SSL terminated nginx server. This way your Rails app doesn't need to know anything about SSL, as well as giving you a number of other benefits like being able to serve assets from nginx, load-balancing, virtual hosts etc.
If you're interested in setting up an environment that is identical to production I'd look into Vagrant.
My head is about to explode from the mangled mess as a result of the following few days trying to setup a development environment for Rails, Apache and Passenger.
The questions I have are:
Do you NEED passenger for a development environment? Can I just develop with pow.cx instead? - I am 99.99% sure the answer is no (you don't use passenger for development), but I need confirmation since I am deeply confused now.
When I deploy, I only use Passenger for that, correct? I.e. I don't ever touch passenger until I deploy.
Is my development environment correct?
Production deployment is simply moving a rails application under the effects of Passenger coupled with an Apache VHOST?
Background (I suggest you read):
It seems that all the information on the web is concerned about explaining things for people who already know what they are doing, rather than explaining in detail how things work it's just a series of installation steps and that has left me extremely confused on the role of things, and how to setup a development environment and deploy a RoR application correctly - so please bear with this long question.
For the past 3 days I have been trying to setup a development environment on my Macbook Pro that isn't destroyed by Apple's rediculous limits on Apache installations. I installed a custom Apache install (from bitnami using their ruby stack, since I refuse to use Server.app) so that I can run Apache and upgrade things like PHP to 5.5 easily, and that works fine.
I am trying to get into RoR but so far it has been a struggle, and I am about ready to give up.
I understand you need Apache to serve Rails applications so that the server can handle requests concurrently rather than one at a time, and that various interfaces for this exist like Thin or whatever; Passenger was highly recommended.
I installed Passenger via their instructions and did some hackery to compile it for the Bitnami passenger installation, rather than the default Apache on Mac OS X - and it's working. When I start apache and run: passenger-memory-stats I get results expected from the installation guide, so that tells me passenger is running.
However, when I try and deploy a simple hello world Rails application I get a slew of "We're sorry…" or no result at all and just a blank page.
I am fairly sure my development environment is correct, everything works except this last bit. I can picture development taking place on a pow.cx server, and once deployment is ready you simply copy the Rails application and configure Apache's VHOST to point to your ready-to-deploy app while Passenger handles the rest, is that correct?
I am using PostgresSQL via the Postgress.app, the server works fine and I can connect to it.
I have gem 'pg' in my Gemfile.
I have already read, and tried every conceivable solution from the following SO questions, but I either get no result or empty logs which is… infuriating to say the least:
We're sorry, but something went wrong. - with Rails, Apache, Passenger
Ruby on Rails: How can i edit database.yml for postgresql?
How do I set up the database.yml file in Rails?
https://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/187128
So with all that said, I am trying to deploy this hello world application (which works on a standard rails server) using the following:
INVOKING APPLICATION VIA:
http://dmarket.local:8081/
VHOSTS:
<VirtualHost *:8081>
PassengerEnabled on
RailsEnv production
ErrorLog /Applications/rubystack/apache2/htdocs/helloworld/project_error.log
CustomLog /Applications/rubystack/apache2/htdocs/helloworld/project_error.log combined
ServerName dmarket.local:8081
ServerAlias www.dmarket.local:8081
DocumentRoot "/Applications/rubystack/apache2/htdocs/helloworld/public"
PassengerPreStart http://dmarket.local:8081
<Directory "/Applications/rubystack/apache2/htdocs/helloworld/public">
Allow from all
Options -MultiViews
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
HOSTS FILE:
127.0.0.1 dmarket.local
127.0.0.1 www.dmarket.local
DATABASE.YML (same for development, test, and production):
adapter: postgresql
encoding: unicode
host: 127.0.0.1
port: 5432
database: tsujp
pool: 5
username: tsujp
password:
A summary of answers to your questions
You don't need Passenger in development. You can develop with Pow, and deploy with Passenger.
But you can use Passenger in development if you want to. It is a good idea to use Passenger in development because that way your development environment will match your production environment more, which reduces the risk of running into unexpected problems when you deploy.
Using Passenger in development is very easy. Use it's Standalone mode, and run passenger start instead of rails server.
Pow is strictly a development-only server. The authors recommend against using it in production.
When you deploy, you touch Passenger. You don't have to touch Passenger until deployment time, but you may.
Production deployment is indeed moving an application under the effects of Passenger, and setting up a virtual host. You will of course also need to install gems (bundle install) setup the database (editing config/database.yml), running database migrations (bundle exec rake db:migrate), etc.
I've also posted updates on the posts that you linked to, in order to make life easier for people who happened to have found those posts via search.
Apache vs Nginx
You will find a lot of people recommending Nginx (e.g. Sergio just did). I second that recommendation. Nginx is faster than Apache, handles slow clients better and is generally easier to use.
Passenger works great with Nginx. It has an Nginx integration mode that is just as easy as the Apache mode. Sergio suggested Nginx + Unicorn or Nginx + Puma, but Nginx + Passenger (which replaces Unicorn/Puma) is much easier to setup, performs great, uses less memory, works better and has more features. Nginx + Unicorn requires a lot of configuration, process management using init scripts, etc.
But this is just a recommendation. You don't have to use Nginx. Sticking with Apache + Passenger is fine. Apache works well enough for most people.
Regarding your Passenger problems
However, when I try and deploy a simple hello world Rails application I get a slew of "We're sorry…" or no result at all and just a blank page.
Whenever you get an unexpected error, the first thing you should do is to read the log files. There are two log files that are important to you:
The web server error log, typically /var/log/apache/error.log. This log file contains:
Phusion Passenger error messages.
Everything that the Rails application writes to STDERR. This typically consists of errors that Rails encounters during startup (but not errors that it encounters when it's handling requests).
The Rails development log (or production log, in case you're running in production), log/development.log (or log/production.log). When an error occurs during request handling, it is typically logged here. This file does not contain errors that Rails encounters during startup.
The error messages will often tell you what the problem is and how to solve it.
This tip can also be found in the Phusion Passenger manual, Troubleshooting section.
Capistrano
Sergio recommended Capistrano. I second that recommendation. You should remember that Capistrano complements Passenger; it does not replace Passenger. Capistrano is a tool for automating tasks. Do you currently create a tarball of your app and scp it to your server, and extract it there? Well, Capistrano automates this sort of thing for you.
For more information about how all the different pieces of the stack fit together (Apache, Passenger, Capistrano, HAProxy, Chef, etc), check out the section "The big picture" on the Phusion Passenger documentation page.
Recommendation summary
Use passenger start in development. It is by far the easiest to get started with. You don't have to edit any configuration files, it works immediately.
Use Phusion Passenger for Nginx in production.
You don't need Passenger in development. In fact, in development mode you don't need even apache. You can use built-in Webrick server ($ rails server) to run your app. And yes. Pow is a good tool, I use it all the time.
In production there are also multiple options. One of them is Apache+Passenger, yes. But you need to put Nginx in front of those (because Apache doesn't handle slow clients very well). If you have nginx, then you can replace apache+passenger with something else. For a long time I've been using Unicorn (ruby web server from github). Now my current favourite is Puma. It uses less resources than unicorn, but has more requirements to your code (it better be thread-safe, because puma is a threaded server).
Now, to the development-production discrepancy: it is known that development should resemble production as closely as possible, because it minimizes risks when deploying. So, my suggestion is: use unicorn everywhere (both development and production). Only on production put nginx in front of it.
Also,
for actually performing deploys, look into Capistrano. It became industry standard for deploying rails apps (but it can also deploy PHP, static files and what have you).
Should I be using passenger in dev to match prod for a ruby on rails project? (as opposed Webrick)
Noting I'll be deploying to dreamhost which uses passenger.
(Also if yes, does it have it's own web-server or do I need to install one?)
Set up a passenger staging server on your production machine. Use same configuration as pro server.
This has just saved my bacon. A recent upgrade we recently pushed broke application and took me a week to get sorted. Fortunately production server continued to function which we found prob.
Use capistrano multistage to manage the same.
You don't have to (mostly). But there might be cases where things can go wrong due to the mismatch between production & dev environment. Using staging environment will catch such issues.
If you want to test things like SSL, then webrick wont work. You need apache/nginx(or other web servers) to use passenger. I also noticed that there is no significant difference in the performance between the two options
I'm trying to deploy my first Rails app here, and I've been stuck on something since last night. I'm encountering some weird behaviors I can't explain.
I'm running Rails, Apache, Phusion Passenger, and for the moment, SQLite 3. (I'll move that over to MySQL shortly.) Currently this is being hosted on a too-small EC2 slice running Ubuntu Server 11.04 (Natty).
When I visit the address of the EC2 slice in the browser, I get the default Rails 500 notice. Here's what's weird, though. When I tail /log/production.log, I see the following error:
ActionView::Template::Error (SQLite3::SQLException: no such table: offers: SELECT "offers".* FROM "offers" WHERE (code = '') ORDER BY created_at desc LIMIT 25 OFFSET 0):
So, I manually opened up the development database in SQLite3, and saw that table in there. The production database, however, does not have that table.
OK, so I'm getting errors with the production database logged in the production log. The application has to be running in production mode, right?
That is what's throwing me. First of all, it's running in development mode on my development machine, and I didn't change any of the files when I deployed it. Neither did I use any fancy deployment tools to deploy it (which may have switched something without my knowledge) - I just did a simple git push.
Furthermore, I added the following to my httdp.conf VirtualHost config:
RailsEnv development
Also, when I run rails console, I can get the following:
irb(main):002:0> Rails.env
=> "development"
So, the application really should be running in development mode, right? In fact, it seems to think (partially) that it is, right?
I'm really not sure what's happening here, and I'd really appreciate some expert advice.
Thanks everyone.
Edit - A few server reboots later, and now the thing just hangs when I try to view it in a browser. Also, Apache seems to hang when I try to restart it (hence the server reboots), related problem, or different problem altogether?
Well, this isn't a 100% satisfactory answer for me, but I did two things, and I think I got it working.
First, I re-installed the passenger Apache module. That may or may not have been necessary.
This was the big thing, though: after I had added the line to httpd.conf to pass the Rails Environment over to Passenger, I believe Apache restarted incorrectly. (Rather, I believe I've been restarting Apache incorrectly for my whole life!)
I was trying to restart Apache this way:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
That has always worked for me (when programming PHP), but it simply wasn't working here. Apache would just stall on the restart.
This, however, works fine:
sudo apachectl restart
I'll have to ask Server Fault what the significant difference is between the two.
I hope that helps someone out.