I'm developing an small application on RoR and OSX 10.6.4 workstation, and I'm looking for guidance on two things: -
How to share my application locally with others so others in my team can get access to my local webserver (Mongrel?) to view/play with my system before I release it into production. From my default installation I can play with it both others can't seem to access it - not even from say http://:3000, which works from local - so I'm a bit confused.
Advice on how best to deploy it onto a production webserver assuming I deploy onto Linux. What webserver should I use and are there instructions?
Thanks in advance. Networking and webservers are NOT a strong suite :-)
Cheers
B
The development Mongrel is by default only accessible through localhost. In order to be visible from the outside you need to ask it to bind to your external IP address. Assuming your IP address is 10.0.0.5, you need to do this:
script/server -b 10.0.0.5
For deployment on Linux, the easiest way is perhaps using Passenger, and either Apache or nginx for a web server, whichever you're most comfortable with (if you have no preference, go with Apache). Documentation can be found here.
Why can't others access it via http://your.ip:3000/? ./script/server mongrel listens on 0.0.0.0 by default. 0.0.0.0 stands for listening on every interface in Linux.
Related
I want to know what is this: localhost:8000, found in Codecademy tutorials for AngularJS and Ruby on Rails. I even installed Apache 2, but to work with it I need to dial: http://localhost/. While working on some html files, I often come across Firefox's Inspect Element where a section is to mention localhost and its number like this: localhost:8000. I want to know what's this and can I use it to access my host from my android device or some other PC as we do access Codecademy's localhost to learn AngularJS and Ruby on Rails. Pls help. Thanks in advance. :-)
Localhost is the loopback-address of your pc. The IP-address behind it is 127.0.0.1. With localhost, it is possible to simulate a web-server environment and it is mostly used to simulate running web-applications as if they are running on a webserver. :8000 stands for the port-number on which the browser connects to the server. This is because the application runs (in this case) on port 8000 of the server. So it is not enough to just install Apache 2 and surf to http://localhost/ you have to configure Apache so that it runs your web-application on the desired port. The port-number itself has no special meaning. The different ports are just a part of the url so the browser knows on which port it has to connect. Some protocols use default ports. (e.g. HTTP will always connect to port 80, unless your specify another port in your webbrowser)
I'm sure a lot of people can explain it much better, but here is a begin.
More info about running ruby on rails on an Apache webserver:
How can i run a ruby on rails project on apache server?
How to setup Ruby on Rails Hosting using Apache, from Development to Production
EDIT: Technically, the whole 127.0.0.0/8 address block is reserved for loopback purposes. The default one, configurged in hosts.txt is 127.0.0.1 and the most famous.
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!
Here is my setup:
Mac OS X 10.6
Ruby 1.8.7
Rails 3.1
I have a Rails 3.1 application that starts with Unicorn every time this machine starts up (via a .plist in /Library/LaunchDaemons). The .plist essentially does this:
cd /my_application_directory
sudo unicorn -E production -p 80
And everything's working fine. However, I'd like to be able to set up SSL so that traffic is encrypted. I don't need a real certificate signed by a real CA, because the application is only accessible over a local network.
I've found articles like this one on generating certs, but I'm not sure where to go from there (or even if that's the correct starting place).
For my basic needs, I've found the .plist method to be much easier to work with than something like Phusion Passenger, so I'd like to continue doing it that way if possible.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I don't believe Unicorn supports being an SSL endpoint, so you're going to need another process to decrypt/encrypt the traffic for you.
On Mac, it's probably easiest to use apache, because it's already installed.
Sorry to not have detailed steps, but you're looking to do the following:
Change the port unicorn listens on, to prevent conflicts with apache.
Set up Apache to serve SSL, just like your linked reference.
Also set up apache to proxy requests to be handled by Unicorn, on the new port you setup. This involves the ProxyPass (and possibly ProxyPassReverse) directive.
Configure apache to start when the Mac boots.
I have a Ruby on Rails application that I'm developing on my computer, which runs Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. I'd like to be able to access it from a remote computer for testing purposes. I've no idea how to proceed. Do I need to set up port forwarding? Virtual hosts? Can anyone point me to an article/tutorial/whatever that has information about how to do this?
Thanks!
If you want to run it using the server script, you can have it listen to a specific IP address like:
script/server -b 192.168.1.5
Substitute your machine's IP address that is accessible over your network. Then other hosts can get to the Rails app via e.g. http://192.168.1.5:3000.
If you mean you're behind a firewall or NAT gateway, then the question of how people outside of your firewall/NAT can get to your machine is another question entirely... something that probably belongs on superuser.com.
The best way I've found is to use http://www.tunnlr.com.
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/