We really like the idea of hosting with Amazon EC2 and the excellent EC2 on Rails, but our cashflow isn't enough to justify a move to EC2. So we've decided to host with linode. Now we're trying to put together the best Rails server build.
For those that don't know, EC2 on Rails is an opinionated Ubuntu Linux Server image for Amazon's EC2 hosting service. Out of the box, it runs a standard Ruby on Rails application with little to no customization.
So, is there something like EC2 on Rails for linode?
We'd need at least the following:
Ruby 1.8.7
Ruby on Rails 2.3.8
MySQL 5
memcached
Automatically runs hourly, daily, weekly and monthly scripts if they exist in Rails application’s script directory
Local Postfix SMTP mail server
SSL support
Passenger + Ngnix or Mongrel + Apache
32 bit image Ubuntu
With a railsy setup, meaning fast and simple. So, anyone run across anything like EC2 on Rails, but for linode?
I have been using linode for my personal use for a while and I think no matter what, you are probably going to have to get your hands dirty. I kind of like it for exactly that reason, but that is just my taste. They do have stack scripts with some predefined setups. The closest I can find to what you are looking for is a ruby/apache/mysql script that is fairly customizable.
From the script:
Installs a fully functioning, ready to
go stack that's optimized specifically
for your Linode's resources. By
default, it creates a VirtualHost
using the reverse DNS of your Linode's
primary IP.
This installs a stack based on Ruby,
Apache, and MySQL. This also gives you
the options to install gems so that
you can be up and running Ruby on
Rails in no time.
Optionally creates a MySQL database
and user, and assigns that user grants
to the database.
You may use this as an example for
creating more VirtualHosts. Set up
VirtualHosts, install your sites,
point your domains to your Linode, and
you're set!
This script downloads and compiles the
source from Ruby's ftp. Along with
Ruby, the latest version of ruby gems
is installed and you have a choice of
initial gems to install. Rails and
passenger can be used to have a ready
to go Rails server. Once this script
has finished be sure to run
'passenger-install-apache2-module' to
complete the passenger install.
Note that this script may take 1.5 - 2
hrs depending on the gems that are
specified.
All details of this stack script are
logged to /root/log.txt and the stack
script is finish when the line
"StackScript Finished!" is written to
the log file.
You might have good luck talking to their support though, they might have some more secret sauce that I haven't found yet.
Nothing in that setup sounds EC2-specific beyond the name. It appears it is just convenient to use with EC2, because they let you grab a disk image from another account.
You are welcome to create your own StackScript to do this and contribute it to the community. Once a StackScript is written, it can be marked public and used by others. EC2 on Rails has a public GitHub repository from which you can get started, and honestly, I'd love to see things like this ported to the StackScript system.
Related
After I finished reading Agile Web Development with Rails, I Have developed my own website.
Now I am trying to deploy my project on linux system I rent, but I know nothing about how to deploy rails.Which server should I user? How to connect to mysql database?
As a java developer, I know I can use tomcat as my server which can convert http request to my own object and use jdbc to connect to my mysql database.
Now I want to know what is the main stream environment rails deployed?
I have heard of Lighttpd and FCGI. Can I use them in the product environment?
thanks
Is your linux system a full VPS (you have complete control?) If not, check your hosting company to see what options are available to you. If so, check to see if they have guides for setting up Rails. A lot (Slicehost, Linode, etc.) do.
Failing that... I would recommend either Apache (or Nginx) with Passenger.
https://www.phusionpassenger.com/
It's pretty straight forward.
As for actually deploying, look into Capistrano (or Vlad). These are a little bit more complicated, but they make life so much easier in the long run.
I'm new to Ruby and Rails, but my team is interested in using Redmine for project management. So my question is as follows: How does one deploy Redmine to a load-balanced server (so really two servers) that doesn't currently run and Ruby/rails apps? Would it be necessary to install ruby/rubygems/etc on both servers and proceed with the installation from there? Thx.
If you are going to deploy any rails app, you'll need to have ruby, rubygems, and probably phusion passenger or some other app server (thin, etc.), on both servers.
For redmine, you should consult the install docs:
http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/RedmineInstall
And the howto guides for install:
http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/HowTos
In general, when load balancing, the trick is the db, and you can use a number of tricks to replicate and load balance the db, as with any other rails app.
There seems to be one guide for that in the wiki, that leads to these (not terribly helpful) comments:
http://www.redmine.org/boards/1/topics/24727?r=24739#message-24739
http://www.redmine.org/boards/1/topics/16687
My own advice would be to set-up both servers as serving up the rails app, but have one be the active master db, and the other the passive slave, then set-up monitoring on the master and if it goes down, promote the slave to master. How to do this is a longer answer, and much code has been written in this direction. Look-up DRBD and Heartbeat for how to do this on linux for mysql.
My setup: Rails 2.3.10, Ruby 1.8.7 on Windows
The last time I deployed a Rails app from Windows to Linux on Slicehost, I used Capistrano, Nginx, Mongrel, and SVN. That was 3 years ago, fast forward to now, I'm still on Windows for development and is now looking to deploy to EC2. A quick search turns up tools like Rubber and Chef which aren't easy to grasp with a quick read. It seems like Rubber and Chef are designed for multi-EC2 instances deployment which will be useful when I need to scale.
I'm also new to Passenger but it seems to be the default way to deploy Rails app nowadays, one thing that isn't so clear to me is whether Passenger is a replacement for Mongrel? In my old setup, I configured Nginx to forward the Rails requests to a cluster of Mongrel processes but I don't see anything like that for Passenger.
Any insights are much appreciated.
We use something like what you're describing for our production server: EC2 + Apache + Passenger. We haven't had any need to use the fancy deployment tools you describe - plain old Capistrano (plus capistrano-ext so we can use it for multiple environments) does the job just fine. I've looked at Rubber (not Chef), but deemed it needlessly automagical and too poorly documented, and I'm really not sure what it offers that can't be done just as well with roles in Capistrano.
Passenger has been great. It's an "overseer" that manages a collection of Mongrel-like workers (I had thought that the workers were Mongrels, but upon further reading, I don't think they are. The Passenger comparisons page even compares its RPS to a Mongrel cluster, so...), starting them up as needed, culling them under low loads, restarting them if they crash, etc. It's actually very similar to the Server + Mongrel Cluster you described, but probably a bit better, as Passenger has an understanding of the underlying workers that Nginx / Apache don't. And you'll have to make a few minor tweaks to get Capistrano playing nicely with Passenger.
And if possible, pair Passenger with Ruby Enterprise Edition (from the same guys who made Passenger). It's a much faster version of Ruby, mostly due to a rewritten, configurable garbage collector. You'll have to tune your GC settings to get the most out of it.
Hope this helps!
Both might help:
http://ginzametrics.com/deploy-rails-app-to-ec2-with-rubber.html
Hosting rails on ec2
Rubystack allows you to have the same Rails environment for development on Windows and for deployment on Linux. We also have EC2 images (scroll to the bottom) and it is completely free, so you may want to give it a try.
Also, this may not work for you, but depending on your requirements, you may want to go for a PaaS solution like Heroku
I admit that I don't follow much of anything "right" on deploying test versus production code. I have been using ASP.NET, and I typically run it locally in Visual Studio, it works, I upload it, I test it again on the production server.
I have read several people say that deploying Rails apps is harder and there are special programs/ways on the ruby site about deploying RoR. I've only toyed with RoR. What is special about deployment? You don't just copy and paste the code and run it (from development machine to the production)? Is it because one is in Apache and the other running on the built in server?
This will be on a Mac Server if it matters.
Deploying RoR is not difficult anymore, especially with Phusion Passenger.
What is somewhat difficult, is getting a automated production environment setup with capistrano, vlad, etc. If you don't mind simply copying your code to the server, you can do that just fine. Most people choose not to do it that way because you lose out on a lot of the benefits that the automated deployment tools give you.
I guess people consider a Rails app harder to deploy than say some PHP apps or such where you just plop the code somewhere and point Apache or whatever at it. But, as mentioned above, you could do that now with Phusion Passenger.
We use Nginx+Passenger, but not for simplicity of deployment. Capistrano is our deploy tool of choice, and really, unless you have a very simple app, you're going to want something like Capistrano anyway. For example, with our deploy, we do a slew of things:
run any database migrations
generate release notes automatically, based on all the commits to Git between the last deploy and this one
notify various people via email (with differing lists depending on whether the deploy is to our staging environment or production) - we do this via cap_gun which integrates with Capistrano.
Notify New Relic RPM of the deploy so it can mark it in our RPM analysis
Notify Hoptoad of the deploy, so it too can have that data when reporting any exceptions
produce our sitemap.xml file, and ping Google to tell them there's a new one
update crontab files (I store our crontab files for each server in our git repo, and then on deploy it sees if there is a new version and updates accordingly, etc.).
flush/restart memcached
There are other ways aside from Capistrano, but it's a proven tool, with a lot of flexibility, yet pretty simple to setup a vanilla configuration.
So, my take is that once you get into any app that is beyond just the very simplest of apps, you're going to need/want to be doing things other than just simply updating the code. In the beginning though, if you just need the code updates, and maybe Rails migrations, then you can do simpler things like Passenger and code sync, or look at tools like Heroku or Engine Yard's stuff where they do a deploy by doing a Git clone (and then offer some additional abilities).
Another super easy way to deploy is with http://heroku.com/
Some of the issues you face with deploying rails to production:
Database connection.
You need to be sure that the database connector is set up for the production environment.
Database migrations.
You have to run database migrations against the production database even though you may have already run them in production/testing/staging
Ruby version. The version or sub-version or Ruby can trip you up, e.g. An error occurred while installing debugger-linecache (1.1.1), and Bundler cannot continue
Gem dependency.
Your production environment may have different packages and gems from development. Bundler will figure this out for the most part and install the dependencies but occasionally there are still issues that you have to resolve manually.
Dependencies.
Some gems on some machine have particular dependencies. I have seen frequent problems with using gems on my unix box that work on OSX and vice-versa.
Note the last 3 shouldn't affect you if on the same machine but I included them based on the title and to be comprehensive.
It's not especially hard. If you stick to conventions then with a little bit of configuration it boils down to this:
cap deploy
...however there is sometimes a bit of effort needed up front to get the workflow in place.
The good news is that lots of people have packaged up solutions and stacks for RoR that you can just plug and play. For example, google ec2onrails - this is a packaged Ubuntu image and set of capistrano tasks for running rails apps in Amazon's EC2 cloud, with lots of common stuff set up already out of the box.
Choose a good hosting provider and you should be able to find something similar for that also.
An easy way to deploy Rails apps is to use Phusion Passenger. Deployment doesn't get much easier than that for any programming language or framework. You can do that on a Mac server.
Another really easy way to deploy rails is with jruby and the glassfish gem.
I have been creating a website with Ruby on Rails, and will be hosting it through a friend. He has the space and capacity to host the server, and I have a system to devote to being a dedicated server. And this is my first attempt at a Rails website, plus self-hosting with a friend.
I will be formatting and preparing the server today and tomorrow with the following software configuration:
Apache2
Phusion Passenger (aka, mod_rails)
Ruby Enterprise Edition
MySQL 5
I do have a number of questions, and I apologize for their complexity. I haven't found a guide for this configuration yet, and being new to Rails I haven't the experience to navigate my way through this yet.
What build of Linux is most recommended for this configuration?
I have been planning to deploy on CentOS. The caveat is that I have been a Windows user since my early days, and have only used Linux as a webhost and very few development commands (such as CVS). Thus my knowledge of Linux is rather small, and my experience smaller. If I run into any deployment snags, technicalities thanks to the distro of Linux, or anything of the sort ... I'm totally hung out to dry.
This includes things like building anything from source code.
How do I set up Capistrano on my server for remote deployment?
I know this is an oxymoron (Capistrano is client-side, not server-side) but I don't know what it needs on the server. Does it need FTP? SFTP? SSL? SSH? What?
What do I configure on my server, and how do I configure it, to enable Capistrano to run smoothly?
Also, how do I refer Capistrano to the fact that my SCM is on localhost and is by Mercurial? (I used TortoiseMg.) I could convert to SVN and probably set up a repository on the server, but I'm not entirely sure how to do that.
What is the biggest snag you watch for when deploying from a localhost development, to deployment on a totally different OS?
Miscellaneous
Why not deploy to Windows then? Because I'm footing the bill, and I don't want to pay for another copy of XP or possibly 2000; I refuse to use Vista. Plus, Linux is much more secure than Windows for a server environment.
Why not read the existing guides? I am; this is my first site with Ruby on Rails, my budget is in the less than double-digits area now, and I'm trying to expand my horizons by doing the server configuration and the remote deployment (for further development of the site) by myself. I've relied on hosts in the past for my PHP websites, but they're much more homogeneous in their configuration. Ruby servers are expensive, prohibitively so for me, and to learn its configuration wouldn't hurt to know.
What build of Linux is most recommended for this configuration?
Any of the distributions will work fine as long as they can run Apache2 (which is almost all of them) and you can install Passenger (along with ruby and rails).
I personally use CentOS and find its package manger to be ridiculously easy to use (yum).
yum install -y httpd ruby
gem install rails passenger
Then all you have to do is a little configuration in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf to add Passenger (following the install file for Passenger passenger-install-apache2-module) and point it to your deployment folder .../app_name/current/public.
Since you are using Passenger you should override the restart task to work for it.
config/deploy.rb
namespace :deploy do
desc "Restart Application"
task :restart, :roles => :app do
run "touch #{current_path}/tmp/restart.txt"
end
end
How do I set up Capistrano on my server for remote deployment?
All Capistrano needs is SSH access with sufficient permissions to deploy, migrate, restart app server, etc. Just follow the getting started guide at the Capistrano website and you will be up and running in no time.
Capistrano needs access to your SCM, you will need to allow it to connect to your machine. All Capistrano does is checkout your code into a release folder and moves the symbolic link from the old version and restarts your app server.
What is the biggest snag you watch for when deploying from a localhost development, to deployment on a totally different OS?
The biggest snag is with migrations, test, test, test, and test them some more. A bug in your application is easy to fix and redeploy, but a bug in your migration could end up a huge pain in the ass with the possibility of data loss.
I've found the articles posted at Slicehost.com (a VPS hosting company) to be pretty helpful.
The full list of articles are at: http://articles.slicehost.com/sitemap . You'll find a number of articles there related to production deployment of a Ruby on Rails application.
I recommend using Ubuntu server and deprec, as it provides a ton of sysadmin recipes that make things even easier.