Pow server: serving external domain via POW_EXT_DOMAINS - ruby-on-rails

Pow server is working fine with .dev domains on my local machine (OS X Lion). I now need it to serve an external domain because I'm developing an ecommerce site and my Payment Service Provider's system need to directly communicate with my development server. However I'm having trouble getting Pow to serve an external domain via the POW_EXT_DOMAINS environment variable.
Here's what I've done:
symlinked my rails app to ~/.pow/myapp (I can access it fine at http://myapp.dev)
Signed up for a free no-ip.org account and created a domain, e.g. myapp.no-ip.org, with an A record pointing to my external IP address
Set up port forwarding of port 80 on my router to my local machine
Set Pow's POW_EXT_DOMAINS environment variable to no-ip.org (export POW_EXT_DOMAINS=no-ip.org)
When I go to http://myapp.no-ip.org I can see the 'Pow is installed' splash screen, so I know the domain is reaching my machine. However Pow doesn't seem to recognise that an app is being requested.
Any ideas? Thanks in advance for any advice.

I got it working - here's the solution in case any one else has the same problem.
I had originally set the POW_EXT_DOMAINS variable by simply typing export POW_EXT_DOMAINS=no-ip.org in terminal.
Instead, you should create a pow config file at ~/.powconfig and put the command into that file:
export POW_EXT_DOMAINS=no-ip.org
Then restart pow by manually killing the process in activity monitor.
Pow then properly runs the myapp symlink when I access http://myapp.no-ip.org
Hope that helps someone else.

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?

Deploy Rails server on Digital Ocean, works with direct IP address only, not with domain name

Got server deployed in production mode through this tutorial.
It works on my direct Digital Ocean IP address, but my domain name still shows ZPanel
Have you installed mod_passenger?
Have you created the virtual host in your apache httpd.conf?
Have you restarted apache?
Hint: put a index.html file in your application - public/ directory and some gibberish in it, then see if it loads fine in your browser. If it does not, then your apache config needs work, if it does but the Rails app still won't work, you should look at that one instead.

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!

Running Ruby on Rails app on server

I am using Aptana Studio 3 for development of ROR apps. I used run server command and it showed you can access your app on {http//0.0.0.0:3000/}, but when I try to access this URL, it tells me to check your Internet connection. I tried several other ports also but it is not working. I have created/modified the files necessary and migrated the database successfully too. Appreciate any help in running the app over the browser. I am currently using WeBrick Server.
so, in your title you say "on server". what does that mean? when you are running it on a different machine than your own, you need to use the address of that machine or it's domain name. keep in mind that firewall rules might prevent any connection to that server.
when you are ON the machine, via ssh for example, you can try calling the then "local" rails instance with curl http://localhost:3000/ to verify that it is running.

Remotely viewing web pages served by pow.cx

Using WEBrick you could navigate to an app you were serving from another device/virtual machine by navigating to your.ip.address.here:port
Is it possible to do something similar with pow.cx?
The latest version of Pow (0.4.0) now includes xip.io support. You can read about the release here.
Here's a quick explanation of how this helps Pow serve your Rails apps across your entire local network, from their post:
Say your development computer’s LAN IP address is 10.0.0.1. With the
new version of Pow, you can now access your app at
http://myapp.10.0.0.1.xip.io/. And xip.io supports wildcard DNS, so
any and all subdomains of 10.0.0.1.xip.io resolve too.
Here's a description of xip.io, from their site:
xip.io runs a custom DNS server on the public Internet. When your
computer looks up a xip.io domain, the xip.io DNS server extracts the
IP address from the domain and sends it back in the response.
There are basically two options:
Don't use pow: run your applications on localhost as usual and access them as usual
Edit the hosts file (or local DNS) to point your server machine ip
Example accessing from a virtual windows machine:
Suppose you are running two rails applications in pow: store.dev and auth.dev, and you want to access them from a windows xp virtual machine to test them with IE, you only need to edit your hosts file to add the lines:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
# Allow to access applications in pow.
# The ip address points to the host machine localhost, that usually is the default gateway
10.0.2.2 store.dev
10.0.2.2 auth.dev
And then open the IE browser to access your applications in http://store.dev and http://auth.dev respectivelly.
Specifically, no, because Pow uses the Host header of the request to determine which app you need to access. To get that working remotely, you would have to have the remote machine map the required domain name to your IP address - either with a local DNS server or by editing the HOSTS file. Both of which are possible but annoying.
The simplest thing to do in that case is to start up a standalone Rails server as you mentioned (using ./script/server or rails s depending on the version), and then you can address http://[ip address]:3000 as before.
In other words, Pow works because it intercepts your local domain resolution, something that isn't affected by (or available to) remote machines.

Resources