After deploying Ubuntu 8.10 server, installing Ruby on Rails and all its prerequisites, and installing Phusion Passenger, there are just a few Passenger specific steps necessary to get your Rails application up and running.

Create a directory to house all of your Rails applications (you can put this wherever you like):

cd
mkdir railsapps
cd railsapps

Create your Rails application (“first”) with a mysql database:

rails -d mysql first

Create a SymLink for Passenger to follow from your application/public directory to the Apache DocumentRoot/SubUri:

sudo ln -s ~/railsapps/first/public /var/www/first

Update the Apache config to let Passenger know about the application:

sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

Append the following at the end of the config:

RailsBaseURI /first

Restart Apache to apply your changes:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now that we have Apache and Passenger looking in the right places, we can get back to editing some of the Rails settings.

Change into our rails application root directory:

cd ~/railsapps/first

Edit the /railsapps/first/config/environment.rb file to notify rails that you are operating out of a SubURI

vi config/environment.rb

Just inside the end of the function “Rails::Initializer.run do |config|” add the following:

config.action_controller.relative_url_root = "/first"

So the last few lines of your environment.rb file should look like:

  # Activate observers that should always be running
  # Please note that observers generated using script/generate observer need to have an _observer suffix
  # config.active_record.observers = :cacher, :garbage_collector, :forum_observer

  config.action_controller.relative_url_root = "/first"
end

Edit the /railsapps/first/config/database.yml file to make sure you have correctly specified your database login information

vi config/database.yml

Call rake to create your application database

rake db:create

Your first rails app is now up and running! You should be able to browse to it at http://YourServerURI/first

Phusion Passenger™ — a.k.a. mod_rails or mod_rack — makes deployment of Ruby web applications, such as those built on the revolutionary Ruby on Rails web framework, a breeze. It follows the usual Ruby on Rails conventions, such as “Don’t-Repeat-Yourself”.

After setting up Ubuntu 8.10 and installing Rails, I executed the following steps to get Passenger installed.

Install Phusion Passenger:

sudo gem install passenger
sudo passenger-install-apache2-module

Upon success, passenger should return you the following response:

The Apache 2 module was successfully installed.

Please edit your Apache configuration file, and add these lines:
    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/ruby1.8

To do as passenger instructs:

sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

Opening that file, I added the “ServerName” at the beginning and Rails/Passenger items at the end of the file. I also cleaned up some of the spacing (for cleanliness sake).

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName glenfiddich-u.parallel21.com
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

    DocumentRoot /var/www

    <Directory />
        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
    </Directory>
    <Directory /var/www/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride None
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Directory>

    ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
    <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
        AllowOverride None
        Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>

    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log

    # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
    # alert, emerg.
    LogLevel warn

    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined

    Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"

    <Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
        Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
        Order deny,allow
        Deny from all
        Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
    </Directory>

    RailsEnv development
		
    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/ruby1.8
</VirtualHost>

The last thing to do is restart Apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

After creating and launching a VirtualMachine on a Vista Host and installing Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, I executed the following steps to configure my Ubuntu server for Ruby on Rails.

After trying (and failing at the implementation of) several other sets of Ubuntu/Rails howto guides, most of my inspiration came from a Ubuntu/Ruby on Rails install guide that actually works.

The Steps

Update aptitude:

sudo aptitude update

Run any distribution upgrades: this step downloaded approximately 100MB and took a few minutes to install;

sudo aptitude --assume-yes dist-upgrade

Now that we are up to date, get a few Rails prerequisites:
– build-essential = “Informational list of build-essential packages”
– ruby = An interpreter of object-oriented scripting language Ruby
– ri = Ruby Interactive reference
– rdoc = Generate documentation from ruby source files
– irb = Interactive Ruby (irb)

sudo aptitude --assume-yes install build-essential
sudo aptitude --assume-yes install \
  irb \
  irb1.8 \
  libmysql-ruby \
  libmysql-ruby1.8 \
  libopenssl-ruby \
  libopenssl-ruby1.8 \
  libreadline-ruby1.8 \
  libruby1.8 \
  rdoc \
  rdoc1.8 \
  ri \
  ri1.8 \
  ruby \
  ruby1.8 \
  ruby1.8-dev

Download the latest gems, manually, because aptitude doesn’t appear to be able to get the latest version, etc.

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/45905/rubygems-1.3.1.tgz
tar xzvf rubygems-1.3.1.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.1
sudo ruby setup.rb
cd ..
rm -f rubygems-1.3.1.tgz 
rm -rf rubygems-1.3.1

Create symlinks: the installer didn’t do it for me, so i had to create them manually;

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/local/bin/gem
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ruby1.8 /usr/local/bin/ruby
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/rdoc1.8 /usr/local/bin/rdoc
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ri1.8 /usr/local/bin/ri
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/irb1.8 /usr/local/bin/irb

Install rails (takes a while…no status):

sudo gem install rails

Install other gems of interest:

sudo gem install rake
sudo gem install capistrano
sudo gem install capistrano-ext
sudo gem install ruby-debug
sudo gem install term-ansicolor
sudo gem install mongrel
sudo gem install annotate-models

Install apache: I’m not totally confident in the necessity of this step since we installed Apache during the Ubuntu install process… but what do i know?

sudo aptitude --assume-yes install \
  apache2-mpm-worker \
  apache2-prefork-dev \
  comerr-dev \
  libapr1-dev \
  libaprutil1-dev \
  libdb4.6-dev \
  libexpat1-dev \
  libkadm55 \
  libkrb5-dev \
  libldap2-dev \
  libmysqlclient15-dev \
  libpcre3-dev \
  libpcrecpp0 \
  libpq-dev \
  libsqlite3-dev \
  libssl-dev \
  uuid-dev \
  zlib1g-dev

My Apache install was not without incident. Although everything appears to be working, I did get the following reponse during the install:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  libapache2-mod-php5: 
    Depends: apache2-mpm-prefork (> 2.0.52) but it is not installable or
             apache2-mpm-itk but it is not installable
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:
Remove the following packages:
  libapache2-mod-php5
  php5-mysql

After creating and launching a VirtualMachine on a Vista host, I captured the following screenshots to document the process of installing Ubuntu 8.10.

Post install, I updated the Network Interface config and enabled the Firewall.

Ubuntu Install Screenshots

Network Interface

DHCP was enabled during install, so after logging on, I edited the network interface config to set a static IP address.

sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

Remove the DHCP line:

#iface eth0 inet dhcp

replacing it with:

iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.0.100
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.0.0
broadcast 192.168.0.255
gateway 192.168.0.1

restart the networking service to apply the changes

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

If you need to edit your DNS, you can do so via:

sudo vi /etc/resolv.conf

Firewall

I enabled the firewall software (UFW) that came with Ubuntu, opening it up to allow OpenSSH, Apache and Samba

sudo ufw allow OpenSSH
sudo ufw allow "Apache Full"
sudo ufw allow Samba
sudo ufw enable

To verify the firewall is working properly,

sudo ufw status verbose

which should produce the following results:

Status: loaded
Logging: on
Default: deny
New profiles: skip

To                         Action  From
--                         ------  ----
22/tcp (OpenSSH)           ALLOW   Anywhere
80,443/tcp (Apache Full)   ALLOW   Anywhere
137,138/udp (Samba)        ALLOW   Anywhere
139,445/tcp (Samba)        ALLOW   Anywhere

Logout

Given that the console is constantly grabbing control of my mouse and frustratingly small, I logged out, logging back in via SSH to do the remainder of the configuration.

logout

If you haven’t already done so, now would probably be a great time to make a backup/copy of your VM.

I was recently coerced into checking out what all the Ruby on Rails hype is about. In reading about Rails, it sounds like trying to get it to run with IIS is probably not the best idea. So I’ve taken the leap to setting up a virtual machine running Ubuntu 8.10 Server.

Being strictly a .NET developer for the last 8 years, I know practically nothing of the *NIX environment, LAMP stack or anything else that doesn’t come with Windows Update. So, everything here must be taken with a grain of salt, as I am well out of my comfort zone.

Sun xVM Virtual Box

Lacking a spare computer, I immediately stumbled across Sun’s FREE VirtualBox software at http://www.virtualbox.org/. Version 2.1.2 was released as of this post. I am running Vista Business as my host OS. The following screenshots are the steps I took to get my VirtualBox configured for Ubuntu.

Change the default directories

The default data directories in Vista are in C:\Users\YourProfile\.VirtualBox\… I generally don’t allocate a lot of extra room to my system partition, so I set the defaults to D:\VirtualBox\…

Create a “New” Virtual Machine

Update Virtual Machine Settings

There are a few settings that need to be changed on the Virtual Machine that you have just created. The following screenshots show PAE/NX being enabled, the Ubuntu ISO being mounted and changes to the type of network adapter.

Start your engines!

Last but not least, click “Start” to launch the Ubuntu install process on your new Virtual Machine.