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/
Related
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.
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.
I am planning to have a web application.
To do so, I studied about ruby and ruby on rails. I am using linux server from amazon clouding system.
I bought a domain from godday, and I put the IP address on DNS setting. When I run 'rails s' command, I can connect to the wep page through port 3000 in such a way that domain.com:3000. However, I cannot directly connect to domain.com. How can I my domain works without port 3000?
And Do I have to run 'rails s' every time to make the wep page work? Actually I tried to use 'rails s &' to make it run in background. But it fails. How can I make the server run even though I am not connected to the linux server?
Thank you!
usually you use rails s just in development. there are quite a few ruby web servers you can choose from for your production environment: puma, passenger or unicorn to name a few.
of course all of them have their own tutorials how to set them up. for starters, i'd go with with passenger because it's integrated with nginx and apache and easily set up.
You need to specify a port, if you don't see the port it can be either 80 (http) or 443 (https).
rails server -p 80
On linux you have to be root to bind to port less than 1000, so just append sudo in front.
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'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.