April 2011 Server Setup with Rails, Ubuntu, Nginx, RVM, Capistrano, Git
There are other blogs out there telling you how to set up a ruby
server install with ubuntu, nginx, passenger, linode ubuntu 10.10, and
rvm, but I couldn’t find one that put it all together, so I decided to
share my setup from beginning to end. I hope it helps you, but I’m also
hoping you point out any risks that I should clean up.
In general I used “this blog”:http://thekindofme.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/rails-3-on-ubuntu-10-10-with-rvm-passenger-and-nginx/, but it didn’t have everything I needed, as you’ll see below.
First I set up the server in linode, then connected to the server via a simple ssh command:
ssh root@tacitus
Before anything else, I had to install basic applications such as git and emacs.
sudo apt-get install git emacs
I decided that I wanted to set up everything from the perspective of
the deployment user, passenger, so I created the user *passenger*:
root@li289-94:~# useradd -d /home/passenger -m passenger root@li289-94:~# usermod -s /bin/bash passenger root@li289-94:~# passwd passenger
Now set-up ssh with public keys to enable password free auto-connection. Then I logged in as root, added passenger
to sudoers (using visudo and adding passenger to the sudo group) and started getting ready to install the ruby
version manager, _rvm_.
bash < <(curl -s https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/install/rvm)
Now, we need to load RVM into a shell session to .bashrc to make the rvm executables available.
added [[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"
To prevent restarting the shell, you can run source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm to get everything up and running immediately.
In order to test the installation, I tried ‘type rvm | head -n1’ to be sure rvm was a function available to the user.
Now, it’s time to get everything ready for the heavy lifting a ruby install requires.
sudo aptitude install build-essential bison openssl libreadline5 libreadline5-dev curl git-core zlib1g zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libmysqlclient-dev
And I forgot to run (needed later):
sudo apt-get install libxslt-dev libxml2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev
And the big moment, the chance to let rvm handle the latest ruby. (This will take a good bit of time.)
rvm install 1.9.2 rvm use 1.9.2 --default
With 1.9.2 installed, we can now configure passenger and create a gemset for our project
rvm 1.9.2 --passenger rvm gemset create polco rvm 1.9.2@polco gem install passenger rvmsudo passenger-install-nginx-module
Stick with the passenger defaults. The only problem was on rvm 1.9.2 –passenger, I get:
NOTE: If you are using Passenger 3 you no longer need the passenger_ruby, use the wrapper script for your ruby instead (see 'rvm wrapper')
This was a new one to me, and made me deviate from the script I was following. I am using passenger-3.0.6, so I am definitely more up to date than the server. Due to this error, I broke with the blog I was following and did not change passenger_ruby to:
passenger_ruby /home/wayne/.rvm/bin/passenger_ruby;
This might still be something I need to do since I am currently getting a 404. I am changing back to this — which for me is the following line:
passenger_ruby /home/passenger/.rvm/bin/passenger_ruby;
h3. Passenger Configuration
gem install passenger
I chose, “compile and install nginx for me” and chose default install
locations. This takes a good while too. Now it was time to set up
nginx.
The installer told me that my configuration was already modified and
that:
This installer has already modified the configuration file for you! The
following configuration snippet was inserted:
http {
...
passenger_root /home/passenger/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180/gems/passenger-3.0.6;
passenger_ruby /home/passenger/.rvm/wrappers/ruby-1.9.2-p180/ruby;
...
}
To prepare for the deployment, I made the deployment directory:
mkdir -p /home/passenger/polco/public/;
So now I set up a basic server with the following nginx.conf file:
worker_processes 1;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log debug;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
passenger_root /home/passenger/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180/gems/passenger-3.0.6;
# passenger_ruby /home/passenger/.rvm/wrappers/ruby-1.9.2-p180/ruby;
passenger_ruby /home/passenger/.rvm/bin/passenger_ruby;
include mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
sendfile on;
keepalive_timeout 65;
server {
listen 80;
server_name localhost;
root /home/deployer/polco/public;
passenger_enabled on;
}
}
And I installed an nginx start script:
cd git clone git://github.com/jnstq/rails-nginx-passenger-ubuntu.git sudo mv rails-nginx-passenger-ubuntu/nginx/nginx /etc/init.d/nginx sudo chown root:root /etc/init.d/nginx
Now I am making a single-user git repo:
mkdir ~/polco.bare.git/ cd polco.bare.git/ git init --bare
So I could now run from my desktop:
git push ssh://passenger@tacitus/~/polco.bare.git/ master
Everything worked . . . so far, now for the hard part . . .
h3. Deployment Setup
On the server, installed the bundler gem (under the current rvm: ruby 1.9.2@polco) and put together the following deploy.rb with Capistrano.
$:.unshift(File.expand_path("/home/tim/.rvm/lib"))
require 'rvm/capistrano'
set :rvm_ruby_string, '1.9.2'
set :rvm_type, :user
require 'bundler/capistrano'
set :application, "polco"
role :web, "66.228.39.94"
role :app, "66.228.39.94"
role :db, "66.228.39.94", :primary => true
default_run_options[:pty] = true
ssh_options[:forward_agent] = true
set :deploy_to, "/home/passenger/polco"
set :deploy_via, :remote_cache
set :user, "passenger"
set :use_sudo, false
set :scm, :git
set :scm_username, "passenger"
set :repository, "ssh://tim@tacitus/~/polco.git/"
set :branch, "master"
set :git_enable_submodules, 1
namespace :deploy do
task :start, :roles => :app do
run "touch #{current_path}/tmp/restart.txt"
end
task :stop, :roles => :app do
end
desc "Restart Application"
task :restart, :roles => :app do
run "touch #{current_path}/tmp/restart.txt"
end
desc "Symlink shared resources on each release - not used"
task :symlink_shared, :roles => :app do
end
end
p. after ‘deploy:update_code’, ‘deploy:symlink_shared’
Then, from my desktop, I built the necessary directories and tested my deployment.
cap deploy:setup cap deploy
The deployment works fine, and I know I still need to get my databases setup on the server for everything to run correctly. But I am surprised that nginx gives me a 404.
2011/04/11 22:52:00 [notice] 20057#0: signal 17 (SIGCHLD) received 2011/04/11 22:52:00 [notice] 20057#0: worker process 20059 exited with code 0 2011/04/11 22:52:00 [notice] 20057#0: exit 2011/04/11 22:52:00 [notice] 20712#0: using the "epoll" event method 2011/04/11 22:52:00 [notice] 20712#0: nginx/0.8.54 2011/04/11 22:52:00 [notice] 20712#0: built by gcc 4.4.5 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.4.4-14ubuntu5) 2011/04/11 22:52:00 [notice] 20712#0: OS: Linux 2.6.38-linode31 2011/04/11 22:52:00 [notice] 20712#0: getrlimit(RLIMIT_NOFILE): 1024:1024 2011/04/11 22:52:00 [notice] 20752#0: start worker processes 2011/04/11 22:52:00 [notice] 20752#0: start worker process 20753 2011/04/11 22:52:16 [error] 20753#0: *1 "/home/deployer/polco/public/index.html" is not found (2: No such file or directory), client: 71.191.237.168, server: localhost, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", host: "tacitus"
Please let me know of any comments or ways I can improve my setup. Also, I would love to hear if any of this was helpful for you.
