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MDS Media Group recently moved their site, which is a Ruby on Rails application, to a new dedicated server on Media Temple. The power and flexibility of the new server is awesome, but having to install and configure everything can prove challenging. I’ve successfully deployed several rails apps with fcgi, mongrel, and passenger in production on shared hosting platforms and local development on my Mac, but this was my first attempt on a completely clean slate.
Media Temple runs CentOS linux on it’s servers, which is a great system, but lacks an easy to use package manager and doesn’t have the absolute latest version of Ruby.
The first step is to <a href="http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/807/(dv)+3.5+Tech+Specs+-+Developer%27s+Tools+package+listing" target="_blank">install the developer tools</a> from the account center.
For the rest of the tutorial, I'm assuming you are logged in via SSH as root and we will be working with "your-domain.com" for this example.
The default installation of CentOS includes Ruby 1.8.5 which is not the latest version. You must remove the current installation.
<div class="code">yum remove ruby</div>
Next, we need to install Ruby and RubyGems.
<div class="code">
cd /opt
wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org:21/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
tar -zxvf ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
ln -s ruby-1.8.6 ruby
cd ruby
./configure && make && make install
cd ../
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/45905/rubygems-1.3.1.tgz
tar -zxvf rubygems-1.3.1.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.1
ruby setup.rb
</div>
Now that the current version of Ruby is installed and RubyGems is available its time to install Rails and Passenger.
<div class="code">
gem install rails
gem install passenger
passenger-install-apache2-module
</div>
Passenger has a wonderful installer that explains the installation process and what configuration is needed to get your rails application up and running... except it is not entirely accurate for Media Temple’s setup. Passenger recommends the following:
<div class="code">
Please edit your Apache configuration file, and add these lines:
LoadModule passenger_module /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.6/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.6
PassengerRuby /usr/local/bin/ruby
After you restart Apache, you are ready to deploy any number of Ruby on Rails
applications on Apache, without any further Ruby on Rails-specific
configuration!
Press ENTER to continue.
--------------------------------------------
</div>
This part is fine for our setup, but first let’s backup our apache config file:
<div class="code">
cp /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.backup
</div>
Then to edit your apache configuration file run the following command:
<div class="code">
vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
</div>
And copy the code provided by the Passenger installer to the end of your apache config file (I alway add comments for later reference):
<div class="code">
#Passenger for Rails
LoadModule passenger_module /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.6/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.6
PassengerRuby /usr/local/bin/ruby
</div>
The next bit of information that the Passenger installer provides is the settings required for your virtual host file:
<div class="code">
Deploying a Ruby on Rails application: an example
Suppose you have a Ruby on Rails application in /somewhere. Add a virtual host
to your Apache configuration file, and set its DocumentRoot to
/somewhere/public, like this:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.yourhost.com
DocumentRoot /somewhere/public
</VirtualHost>
And that's it! You may also want to check the Users Guide for security and
optimization tips and other useful information:
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.6/doc/Users guide.html
</div>
This is the part that can potentially give you trouble. The way Media Temple is configured, each domain in your account is located in a vhost directory. Example:
<div class="code">
/var/www/vhosts/your-domain.com
</div>
Your domain’s vhost.conf file is located here:
<div class="code">
/var/www/vhosts/your-domain.com/conf/vhost.conf
</div>
If it doesn’t exist, you must create the file:
(this is also the same command used to edit it)
<div class="code">
vi /var/www/vhosts/your-domain.com/conf/vhost.conf
</div>
Now for the part that differs from Passenger’s example. With Media Temple’s server configuration, the vhost.conf file should not include the <VirtualHost *:80> or </VirtualHost> directives. Here is an example of how your vhost.conf should look:
<div class="code">
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/vhosts/your-domain.com/path-to/myapp/public
<Directory "/var/www/vhosts/your-domain.com/path-to/myapp/public">
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
RailsBaseURI /
</div>
Make sure that your app’s directory and files have the proper owner ie: the domain's user needs to be the owner because passenger runs as the applications owner.
<div class="code">
chown -R your-user:psaserv myapp
</div>
Now we must remove the default 'httpdocs' directory and create a symbolic link to the application's public folder
<div class="code">
mv /var/www/vhosts/your-domain.com/httpdocs /var/www/vhosts/myapp/httpdocs.old
ln -s /var/www/vhosts/your-domain.com/rails/testapp/public /var/www/vhosts/myapp/httpdocs
</div>
Now restart apache and you are finished!
<div class="code">
service httpd restart
</div>
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2009-02-12T20:21:15Z
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Deploying Rails with Passenger on Media Temple
2009-02-18T10:01:51Z