Deploying Rails Application on Apache with Phusion Passenger

This morning I put on my system admin hat at work once again. The challenge was to setup a Rails development environment on our production server at the cloud and then deploy a Rails application on Apache.

This article is not really a tutorial, although it’s posted under How-to category. It’s more like a log of my actions in carrying out this task; the problems I faced and what I did to get around them, so that I can trace them back if I ever partake a similar task in future.

Rails have several deployment options and Phusion Passenger a.k.a. Mod Rails is the principle of them. It supports both Apache and the lightweight Nginx Server. Check out there documentation page.

Here’s how it went

Logged into the remote server(CentOS 5.0) using ssh

Installed Rails

gem install -v=2.2.2 rails

Installed MySQL gem

gem install mysql — –with-mysql-include=/usr/include/mysql –with-mysql-lib=/usr/lib/mysql/

Installed Phusion Passenger

gem install passenger

Warning received. Required Software missing

Apache 2 development headers… not found

Installed Apache 2 Development Headers

yum install httpd-devel

Installed Apache module for Passenger

passenger-install-apache2-module

Configured Apache 2 to load the mod_passenger module by adding these lines in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.6/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.6
PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby

Uploaded a sample Rails App(myrailsapp) to /home

Added following lines in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf to create a new virtual host

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName rails.myserver.com
DocumentRoot /home/myrailsapp/public
RailsEnv    development
</VirtualHost>

Restart Apache

service httpd restart

Went to http://rails.myserver.com.

Standard Error page for Phusion Passenger displayed. Instructed to consult Apache error log

Checked out the Apache Error Log

cat /etc/httpd/logs/error_log

The last error was

Rails requires RubyGems >= 1.3.1 (you have 1.2.0). Please `gem update –system` and try again.

Updated RubyGems

gem install rubygems-update
update_rubygems

Restarted Apache and went to http://rails.myserver.com again. The following error was showing on the page

no such file to load — sqlite3

Reason: SQLite3-Ruby Gem missing. Tried to install it

gem install sqlite3-ruby

Failed. The system doesn’t have SQLite3 installed

checking for sqlite3.h… no

Installed SQLite3 by building in from source

wget http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-amalgamation-3.6.17.tar.gz
tar xvzf sqlite-amalgamation-3.6.17.tar.gz
cd sqlite-3.6.17
./configure
make
make install

Installed SQLite3-Ruby Gem

gem install sqlite3-ruby

Restarted Apache and visited http://rails.myserver.com

SUCCESS!

Accessing Linux file system from Windows

In a dual-boot system(one which has both Windows and Linux installed), Linux is smart enough to provide you access to Windows VFAT/NTFS partitions. But same is not the case for Windows.

Ext2 IFS is a free software(not open source) that allows you to do that. It installs a pure kernel mode file system driver Ext2fs.sys, which actually extends the Windows operating system to include the Ext2 file system. You can download it from http://www.fs-driver.org. The linux file system will appear as a new disk partition in windows.

If you install this software, I would recommend you to make the linux the drive read-only. Windows is susceptible to Virus/Worm/Trojan attacks. I didn’t want malicious files to spread in my Ubuntu partition.