Deploying Rails and Nodejs - ruby-on-rails

I wrote a real-time web app that consists of the following:
Rails to serve the web pages (listens on port 80)
Nodejs to handle real-time logic (listens to port 8888)
So on a particular page served by my rails app, the JS will use socket.io to establish a connection to my nodejs instance to allow real time http push.
Currently Nodejs communicates with Rails simply by updating the rails database. (I know this is ghetto but it works).
What are my options for deployment?
I have deployed simple web apps on heroku before and I really like the simplicity.
I have also deployed a web app with similar functionality (except it's made up of django + nodejs). I used HAProxy to do reverse proxying to handle direction of traffic to the correct process on my machine. However, I deployed this on a VPS server instead.
Note: the ugliness will probably revolve around:
I am relying on a common db
These processes are listening on different ports

We had this exact issue. We deployed them to separate Heroku applications, but kept them within the same code base. http://techtime.getharvest.com/blog/deploying-multiple-heroku-apps-from-a-single-repo outlines how to do it.
Manually set the buildpack
Set a config variable that you can reuse in step #3.
Create a custom web script that your Procfile uses
A custom script in bin/web
#!/bin/bash
if [ "$RAILS_DEPLOYMENT" == "true" ]; then
bundle exec rails server -p $PORT
else
node node/index.js
fi
And the Procfile:
web: bin/web

I would consider setting these two applications up as separate Heroku applications on different subdomains and just having them both on port 80. The communication between them goes through a shared database so they don't need to reside on the same machine or even datacenter. Socket.io supports cross domain requests on all browsers, so that shouldn't cause any problems.

Related

How to deploy frontend and backend in same heroku applications but different docker images

I'm creating a web application that has Angular for front end and Flask for back end. I already 'dockered' my applications but I'm not sure on how to get them in Heroku as the same application
I've been reading that some people has used a reverse proxy server (this means that both applications are in different heroku app and they connect them using a proxy like traeffik or haproxy). But I don't want to do this, I want them to be in the same application (Example: grupo-camporota.herokuapp.com)
I was thinking that I should push both images, one as web dyno (front) and the other one as a worker (backend) but I've read that the worked dyno it's not for this, but for EXTERNAL apis. I would like to upload both image into heroku and make them communicate between them.
I would like to know how to get this done (I'm pretty sure it's possible), since i'm kinda lost
Your backend can't be a worker dyno: only web dynos can receive traffic from the internet. And one app will only get a single port to listen on, so you can't run two services on a single app.
You could serve your front-end up from your back-end as static files, but I don't think that will work with Docker. Also, Flask doesn't like to serve static files itself, so that may not be a good fit either.
It also looks like you can't communicate between Docker containers using a private network on Heroku. You may just have to deploy two apps (or host your front-end on a more appropriate static host).

How do you run two different web servers (i.e. processes) on Heroku?

I want to run both my Rails api server and NodeJS frontend server(Express server that serves a React app) on one Heroku app.
I use multiple-buildpacks to build both Rails and Node successfully. However, I am not sure how to run both Puma (Rails) and Express (Nodejs) at the same time. Express will serve all requests to / and Puma will serve all requests to /api/*.
A possible solution is using runit but I am shy to use it because it's not an official buildpack by Heroku.

Is one rails server per application?

I have two questions about rails server:
Do I have to start the server from within the application folder?
Is the server I started only for that application?
If they are true, this does not quite make sense to me, since why do I need to start multiple servers?
Or is there some kind of master configuration, so that one server can route to different applications? Is Capistrano for this purpose?
I'm going to assume you're talking about the rails server command, for running a local rails server to test your application, and that you're not talking about setting up a rails application on a remote server. Please mention if that is not the case.
Yes, you must execute rails server from within the root folder of your rails application.
Yes, the server you started is only for that application. It's a self-contained thing.
You should not need to start multiple servers. Even if you have multiple applications, you probably don't need to have more than one running at a time. So, you can shut down the rails server in one application (Ctrl-C) and then cd to your new application, and start a new rails server there with rails server.
If you do need to run two local rails applications at once, you can do so by running them on different ports. So, the first one, you can just execute rails server and it will make your site available at localhost:3000 (because port 3000 is the default port). The next one, you can specify a port other than 3000 - eg. rails server -p 3001 to get a rails app at localhost:3001.
Capistrano is for deploying your applications to a remote server, not for running them locally on your own computer. So, it is not relevant here. What you may be interested in is http://pow.cx/
Again, I've assumed you're talking about running your rails app locally on your own computer. If you're referring to deploying it to the internet on a server, then you can ignore this answer.

AngularJS frontend and Rails backend with AWS in Ubuntu

I would like to discuss about AngularJS and Ruby on Rails working together and deployed in AWS (Amazon Web Services).
So far, I have a development environment with an AngularJS frontend that sends request to a Ruby on Rails API backend. These both are two separate applications (they are in separated git repositories).
The AngularJS app is running in a Node.js server listening on one port, and Rails is running in a Webrick server listening on another port.
Although they work together, AngularJS is not physically integrated in the RoR app.
Now its time to deploy in production environment. For that, I will use an EC2 AWS instance (currently deploying using Elastic Beanstalk). As far as I understand, I can't have the same architecture here.
I would like to know your suggestions this point. Do you see any advantages or disadvantages?
Should I update my development environment, so the AngularJS app is integrated inside the RoR application (and deploy just one application)?
This is something I don't like, because I guess I have to modify many things.
On the other hand, is it possible to run both applications separately, the same way I do in development?
Can I install a node.js and a Unicorn or whichever server manually in production in the same instance?
I finally deployed with two separated applications as described above. The main difference is around the servers. My AngularJS frontend finally runs on an Nginx. And my Rails API is running on a Unicorn.

Serving web application without Lighttpd/Apache

As Rails applications default run on port 3000, would it be possible to start the application on port 80? Is it really required to have a fastcgi/mod_proxy enabled web server in front? My users won't be more than three at a time. If so, how would I be able to do so?
Thanks!
WARNING: This is not a general purpose description of how to set up a Ruby on Rails production environment. If you want to host a public Rails website, I highly recommend using Apache with Passenger, which is very easy to install and maintain.
From your description, it sounds like you are working with some kind of internal application to be used within your office or similar. For this particular purpose, hosting the application via Webrick (the built-in web server in Rails) might be a sufficient solution. To do this, start the server with a -p command line argument: ruby script/server -p 80
This obviously requires port 80 to be available (not bound by some other web server). Also, on most operating systems, you will need root privileges to bind to port 80. The security implications of running a web site as root are serious, so you really only want to do this if you know what you are doing, and are absolutely sure that the server is completely shielded from the Internet.
If there isn't some specific reason you're trying to run with mongrel, I would recommend using Phusion Passenger as it is significantly easier to configure and support than mod_proxy+mongrel.
mongrel - http://github.com/fauna/mongrel
thin - http://code.macournoyer.com/thin/

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