I've been building my first site using Rails, and I want to get it live. Up to now I've only ever put a site live by just dropping all the files onto my VPS via FTP, and I know that's not how it works with a Rails app.
What I don't know is where to even begin with making sure Rails is installed on my VPS (it's Linux based, I bought a package from Webfusion), and then how to deploy it and get it all running properly. My VPS has Plesk 10 installed on it, and from what I've read I need to install Rails alongside Plesk? I may have the wrong end of the stick, so don't hold back if I'm saying stupid things.
I realise this is a really green question to ask, but I've scoured forums looking for a solution I can understand and come up with nothing, so hoping someone here can help.
Thanks in advance!
I've never used a control panel like Plesk but I do have a VPS at linode.com. To get my rails sites up and running I got help from a smashingmagazine blog post and pro railscast episode. The railscast episode is not free but it has great info.
There are a lot of details with each step of getting a rails web server running on a VPS so please look at the blog or railscast video. But a high level overview of the steps is:
install rvm
install ruby and ruby gems
install rails
install a rails web server (a common option is passenger and nginx)
install a database (postgres is a common option)
capistrano for deployment
I wrote an ebook an this topic. After explaining how to set up a server from scratch it focuses on how to deploy an application manually, helping you to understand how this process works under the hood (I left automation out intentionally).
It covers a nginx/Unicorn/MySQL/rbenv setup. If you think that's something for you, you can get it here (it's free for people on my mailing list).
Related
I am trying to find a tutorial or a document or what ever which will show all the real steps with details how to setup my win 7 pc in order to debug - deploy a rails app through rubymine. I have found only spare pieces of the puzzle which i don't know how to connect.
I am newbie to ruby stuff, that's why i need details steps.
I will appreciate any help.
Download the rails installer.
http://railsinstaller.org
And then rubymine, and you should be good to.
That said, windows is less than ideal to do ruby develoment on. I did it for a while, and I spent to much time fighting the fact that ruby is best on a Unix based system. You can install ubuntu on a virtual machine and used than for your rails needs.
I think the best day to do this is to use vagrant. Check this http://www.confreaks.com/videos/2368-rmw2013-ready-to-code-automate-your-development-environment
I have a client who wants to be able to add/delete/modify email addresses etc through cPanel, but I'd much rather add my own virtualhosts config for the actual site instead of a cPanel generated one. (A bunch of reasons. Don't want to install cPanel's ruby, would rather use passenger than mongrel, etc etc).
I don't have a whole lot of experience with cPanel, but by the look of things it takes over httpd.conf & auto-generates a virtualhost for the site - and overwrites stuff if I try to make any changes to the virtualhost settings. Is there a simple means to overwrite these settings without removing the rest of the site's functionality from cPanel?
Cheers...
You are correct in guessing that cPanel takes over a lot of things and auto-generates certain configs. To be honest, I have no idea what it does in regard to virtualhosts configs, but I do have recent experience in other areas which tends to confirm your suspicion:
So, to illustrate... cPanel comes stock with Rails 2.3.5. On the cPanel GemSet page, you can see Rails 3.0.6 shows as available, and even lets you install it via cPanel or SSH/BASH. This results in no error message at all (in fact, cPanel itself reports it as installed), but a rails --version command at SSH/BASH still shows version 2.3.5. After some research on on the cPanel forums, I discovered that this is because cPanel is hard coded for Mongrel support, and Mongrel doesn't support Rails past version 2.3.8. According to one of their moderators, they're looking at a possible Passenger solution, but it's still in the early stages of coding and months away.
So, while I realize my example doesn't specifically answer your question about virtualhosts, I think it confirms the validity of your suspicion that cPanel overrides certain settings, and may even be hard coded in ways that aren't immediately transparent...
I'm interested to play around with RoR a bit. Apart from literature i should read, i'm particularly interested about how to setup development environment.
Here's a good example how to setup environment for Java from Noda Time project wiki pages.
I want something similar but for RoR.
As far as i know - unix operation systems fits way much better (have toyed on windows 1 1/2 year ago - pure nightmare). So it would be nice to get some recommendations about linux distros and how to make it run next to win7/xp.
Basically - i want to shorten endless searching and improvisation until i can play with some code.
P.s. bonus for simple sample project. :)
The single quickest way to get up and running might be to simply grab Netbeans and develop against its built-in JRuby instance. It will walk you through setting up a Rails project and even give you some nice-to-haves like autocompletion.
Baring that, the easiest method is likely to download a Linux VM Appliance pre-Customized for Rails Development and a copy of VMWare Player.
The best 2 ways to go are OS X and Linux, I use Ubuntu just because it's the nicest package that I've found (there will no doubt be a variety of opinons on this.)
For Rails, I like to not use the packages or pre-installed versions, and instead build my own so I can test against various versions of ruby if need be. Hivelogic has a nice post about how to do it for OS X 10.6.
From there, you can just run:
rails myproject
cd myproject
./script/generate scaffold post title:string body:text
rake db:migrate
rm public/index.html
./script/server --debugging
And then connect to http://localhost:3000/posts to get to your application.
Once you get more comfortable, check out running Passenger instead, so you can have multiple applications running at the same time. On OSX there's even a nice Prefpane to easily set up new sites. This also ins't too hard in Ubuntu with the examples provided in the passenger docs.
For editing the application I think the IDEs (Aptana, Netbeans, etc.) are still too heavyweight, especially for small starter projects. I like Textmate (like everyone else) for OSX and gedit with gedit-mate.
Once you're writing applications, you'll find that railsapi has the best interface for browsing all of the various methods not only in Rails, but ruby, authlogic, and a bunch of other common gems.
Lastly, you'll want to look into source control, with git being preferred in the Rails community at the moment.
Good luck!
Get VMWare player
Get ubuntu vm
If it's server version - install desktop x or whatever it's called
Mess around with sudos, visudos
Mess around with vi editor to save newly created account to sudoers list
Mess around with vertical mouse scrolling which apparently does not
work on vmware+ubuntu
Finally install netbeans
Through plugins, install ruby on rails
Some global updating
Enjoy toying
tadaaaa...
Something like that i wanted - with each point explained a bit (no doubt that my steps aren't best ones and sounds funny for those who knows).
I guess that i forgot to mention that i lack knowledge of unix systems in general too.
Anyway - got what i was looking for. :)
I'm kind of lost, I try to deploy my application on a shared dreamhost server.
Now everything works fine locally. It's my first try at Rails, and I'm not really a programmer or sysadmin, just hacking something together.
On Dreamhost, if I start webrick, it works fine on port 3000, but webricks gets killed pretty quickly, I guess that makes sense.
So what do I have to do to make it run?
I enabled fastcgi support and mod_rails.
Now, how do I get the app constantly running?
I keep reading about having to do things to .htaccess and to dispatch.fcgi.
But I can't find any dispatch file in my rails app (2.3.2).
Do I have to create that one manually? Doesn't really feeld very rails-like to me. I didn't really manage to find out what this dispatch file does, and why it's needed.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I looked at the DH Wiki, but couldn't figure it out (http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Rails)
Additions:
I enabled mod_rails and pointed to the public directory (I had already done that).
I keep getting an error: screencast.com/t/KamqVawk
Hm, server logs look like there is actually no request, so this might be a problem on dreamhosts end. It's strange I see that the access.log show a new change date, when I try to access the page, but there is no request noted, error.log is empty too.
Dreamhost Support Answer:
The server was up to date, so that wasn't the problem.
They proposed freezing the Gems, which I did (see: http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Freezing_Gems)
But it didn't help.
I guess I'm giving up, and looking into hosting which is specialized for rails.
Thx for all your help!
Changed to hostingrails.com
I got the app working on hostingrails.com, passenger on hostingrails.com showed me errors, which weren't shown by dreamhost or mongrel. By correcting these errors, I got the app working.
Dreamhost won't let you use webrick if you're using shared hosting. You can either use FastCGI or Passenger to host Rails on shared DH (mongrel is an option if you upgrade to DreamhostPS, but that's obviously more expensive).
For FastCGI, you will need a dispatch.fcgi file (older versions of Rails would generate one when you created a new Rails app, but that stopped around 2.2 if I remember correctly) as well as code in your .htaccess to send requests to the dispatcher. See the Dreamhost Ruby on Rails wiki page for details about setting up FastCGI.
The more preferable option is to set up your application to run on Phusion Passenger (aka mod_rails). It should be pretty simple through your Dreamhost panel, you just need to enable the domain to use mod_rails, and then set the directory for the domain to the public directory of your application. See the Passenger wiki page for more details.
I've received some really great guidance from users of this site, and I'm thinking some advanced Rails people could assist me in resolving the following problem.
I'm attempting to deploy a simple Rails application on a win32 server.
I've been carefully working through these instructions (see http://functionalelegant.blogspot.com/2008/05/deploying-rails-on-windows.html) for win32 Rails application deployment.
I started from a more-or-less clean windows install, then downloaded and installed
Ruby
LightTPD
Rails
Zed's SCGI Rails Runner
Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools
Ruby/DBI ADO package
After that, I've done the following:
I've commented out the line in the SCGI gem (which actually was causing trouble.)
I created the directory structure as suggested, with folders for logs.
I modified the scgi.yaml file and the Lighty config files to reflect my environmental settings.
After this, I wrote the batch scripts to start up Lighty and the SGCI process. They appear to run correctly. However, inside app-errors.log the following lines appear:
2009-05-15 16:48:06: (mod_scgi.c.2645) fcgi: got a FDEVENT_ERR. Don't know why.
2009-05-15 16:48:06: (mod_scgi.c.2469) emergency exit: scgi: connection-fd: 7 fcgi-fd: 8
Finally, when I navigate to http://localhost:xxxx/ I just see a blank page. Update: I just realized the blank page only appeared to be. Viewing the source revealed the following issue:
2C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/drb/drb.rb:573:in `load'":C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/drb/drb.rb:612:in `recv_request'":C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/drb/drb.rb:911:in `recv_request'"?C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/drb/drb.rb:1530:in `init_with_client'"<C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/drb/drb.rb:1542:in `setup_message'"6C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/drb/drb.rb:1494:in `perform'"8C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/drb/drb.rb:1589:in `main_loop'"3C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/drb/drb.rb:1585:in `loop'"8C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/drb/drb.rb:1585:in `main_loop'"4C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/drb/drb.rb:1581:in `start'"8C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/drb/drb.rb:1581:in `main_loop'"2C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/drb/drb.rb:1430:in `run'"4C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/drb/drb.rb:1427:in `start'"2C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/drb/drb.rb:1427:in `run'"9C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/drb/drb.rb:1347:in `initialize'"2C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/drb/drb.rb:1627:in `new'"<C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/drb/drb.rb:1627:in `start_service'"MC:/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/scgi_rails-0.4.3/lib/scgi.rb:402:in `run'"HC:/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/scgi_rails-0.4.3/bin/scgi_service:61"*C:/Ruby/bin/scgi_service:19:in `load'" C:/Ruby/bin/scgi_service:19: mesg" too large packet
Note that 'ruby script/server' runs just fine, but the page then can't be seen externally.
Any ideas? Please let me know if anything jumps out at you.
I wrote the chapter for this in 'Deploying Rails Applications'. http://www.pragprog.com/titles/fr_deploy/deploying-rails-applications
Basically, you want mongrel, mongrel_service, and apache 2.2 with mod_proxy_balancer for windows.
You install 2 or more instances of your app with Mongrel running on separate ports. You set the services to autostart.
Then you set up apache to balance to them.
This is all outlined in the book, and I have some older articles on my website too - if you search for "deloying rails on windows" you'll find some pretty out of date stuff. The apache+mongrel way is the best way for Windows right now, and if you need additional help, feel free to let me know. I'd be glad to help.