I posted this very same item on SERVERFAULT, but got no reply. So here goes:
I'm currently in the process of finishing up a Rails application. I am using Warbler to package it up as a ".war" file and am using GlassFish to deploy it. I do this because the application is to be distributed to companies for in-house use. Arguably i could/should have used another framework to develop an application of this nature, however, I chose ease/speed of development over deployment hassle.
That said, I've got the setup working reasonably well on my development machine. However, I'm curious as to how to go about automating environment initialization. In other words, I need to figure out how to ensure that all DBs, files,etc. are configured upon deployment.
All of the examples I've seen thus far assume you're running your IDE on the system to which you wish to deploy and they have you run your rake tasks manually before deployment. However I need to simply give the end user the ".war" and be able to run all rake tasks upon application deployment/launch.
Can someone point me in the right direction regarding this? FWIW there is nothing in the Glassfish manual about environment initialization etc. -- then again, I don't suppose I should expect them to cover every single aspect of deployment.
Best.
Depending on your database requirements you can embed Derby within the Glassfish environment. You can easily create a blank/default database and then put that clean version in each Glassfish environment you have to set up.
I'm not sure what else you need to configure and initialize, but I'd say that if you can, script it up, either with some rake tasks. Embedding Derby takes care of database startup and initialization. Remember that a war file is just a zip file, so adding config files via a script shouldn't be so hard. You can use rails initializers (/config/initializers/) to load up yml files for configuration or whatever you need to do as the app starts up.
You won't be able to have the intializers create the schema in the database, but you could have them check for default seed data and put it in if it isn't there.
You should be able to access any part of the file system that Glassfish and the JVM can access. I don't know much about Glassfish but the only problems I've had with jruby rails apps on Tomcat were related to relative paths being relative to where the startup script was called from, and not always relative to the installation root. This could probably be solved with the right startup scripts in Tomcat or setting the appropriate start-in folder, I just haven't had a need to dive in to that very much.
Related
Is it possible to deploy Ruby on Rails app on FTP?
If possible then how run migration on it?
My app also have a cronjob. How to set it?
How I deploy my webiste on FTP?
If any tutorial etc availble?
Technically it is possible to deploy by FTP, but the question is, why would you want to? It's a nightmare when compared to a modern, automated deployment system. There's also serious security concerns since FTP is not in any way encrypted and is extremely easy to crack into. Using public Wi-Fi exposes you to the risk of your credentials being captured.
The traditional way to deploy a Rails application is with Capistrano which handles packaging up your application through your version control system and rolling it on to your production system.
If you're not using a version control system that's the first thing you need to fix. Hacking away on files randomly and throwing them to a server over FTP produces quick results but over time it makes it very difficult to get a consistent, tested, reliable build over to your target server.
Remember that Rails is not something that runs automatically like .php files can be, you'll need to use something like Passenger to handle launching your application.
If all this seems a bit convoluted, it's worth trying Heroku to get started. They have a very streamlined approach.
If I understand right what you are asking (is it possible to run Ruby program using only FTP as a protocol), the answer is no, it is not possible. Ruby files is not Web static content (HTML, JS, CSS) that is executed in a browser and hence you can just upload it somewhere (as an option using FTP) and then access via Web. In case of Ruby, apart from uploading content you need to execute commands there (start interpreter, rake etc.) and this is not possible to do using plain FTP.
Normally you may want to use SSH channel to the deployment server to run the program after it has been uploaded. In that case upload is possible via FTP, but as well secure version of it, SFTP (or SCP to just copy files between local and remote machines).
Hope it helps.
On edx.org there is Software as a Service course that grades all submitted assignments.
You upload a zip-file with a Rails project and they run a bunch of integration and unit tests.
How do they do it?
My thoughts are they mount an uploaded application as Rails engine. Is it possible to test one Rails app within another? I'd like to create a similar service, but I don't know what to start with.
I would imagine you could do this in a similar way that Jenkins runs continuous testing on a project. Where each project uploaded to your site gets expanded into a workspace, and then you shell out and execute commands. But that allows for a lot of variable configurations and complexity that probably doesn't make sense in the scope you've proposed. It also doesn't protect your underlying OS from the projects your testing.
You could also probably use an application container like docker and manage each uploaded application that way as well, which would keep everything self-contained, and isolate the application from the OS. It also puts the onus on the developer to package and manage dependencies correctly. I'm guessing they are probably using docker or something similar, here's an example Using Docker for MOOCS
At the point you want to capture the test results and report them back, I'd think they probably use something similar to the Junit formatter for Rspec or they just parse the rspec output directly.
I've been spending the last few months on developing a (my first) Rails application all by my self, just me and my Linux box, all in my development RAILS_ENV, no SCM ("for shame!") or anything. It has become quite the beast now and I am getting ready to release it onto the world. My question is: how am I ever going to make this work?
I installed gems, plugins, servers (MySQL, node.js, nginx, sphinx, juggernaut), photo compression apps that I call, video compression tools (FFMPEG) etc, I also obviously have a DB and a (lot of) seed data. I can't even remember all the things I did to my system to make it all work, but it does.
So now, when I deploy this on some stranger's server, how do I make sure that all those things get installed and configured correctly? How is e.g. FFMPEG ever going to get installed on this server when I deploy my application. How will the seed data get uploaded, how will the servers get started, with the right parameters etc.
I have read (a little bit) about Capistrano which seems to be the deployment tool of choice in the Rails community, but I am not sure if that will cover all my needs. For example, how do I figure out all the gems I used or the plugins (do I even need to know?). Is there any way I can test the deployment on my own linux box,the same I am developing on, i.e. pretend that I am hosting my own production server/rails_env and "deploy" it there?
Any help will be much appreciated.
Cheers.
There a lot of standards to follow that make life easier...
As far as figuring out which gems you need, you could try and use RVM and make a local config that you keep adding gems to until your app works. This will be kind of like starting from scratch so that you are sure to know precisely what configuration you need to run. (And it should make it easy to stand up a new, identical environment each time.)
The RVM route will allow you to test in a specific environment, which should help.
You can list the required gems in your environment.rb file so that the server demands them on start-up.
Good Luck, Cowboy .
I just look up at rails sources and find folder named "dispatches". There is four file in it. I want to know purpose of this files. I know I use this files on my production server, but I never used to think of their purpose. I know there is something about attaching Rails app to Apache server. On my production server rails appname command add this files to public folder automatically. Can I set up this behavior on my development machine?
The rails dispatcher is the entry point for a rails application and is used to bootstrap the environment.
They have a long history and in a lot of ways they are almost obsolete. In days gone by rails apps used to be powered using cgi or fastcgi, which was a way for the webserver to communicate with a rails process. The boot process would be initiated by dispatch.fcgi or dispatch.cgi. Nowadays people are more likely to use apache/nginx+passenger or apache/nginx+mongrel/thin. (Does anyone still use lighttpd?)
I'm a little fuzzy on how dispatch.rb is used, but I think it's used by upstream rails servers such as mongrel/thin to bootstrap the rails process. However, now that rails is rack compatible I'm not entirely sure if that has changed.
You don't need to pay the dispatch.* files any attention.
I hope this helps.
I'm new to Ruby on Rails and am creating a test application. So far, it's working, but when I make some minor changes to my views, the page doesn't change.
My problem may be related to this question, but I'm not sure what is meant by setting the date and time in the VM. My code is on a remotely hosted server, so I assume it would use the system time of that machine.
Is there a caching issue here? What can I do about it?
If you don't have control over the server environment yourself (no shell access, etc.), you can set the following at the top of config/environment.rb:
ENV['RAILS_ENV'] = 'development'
Development doesn't cache much, so while it's slower it's much nicer to develop in.
You'll still need to restart your app after making changes to anything outside the app/ folder though (configs, plugins, etc.).
You need to restart your Rails app (or Apache if you are using Passenger) if you are in production mode!