Josel's Blog

This post will outline the process of setting up Ruby, Rails, and Phusion Passenger. Phusion Passenger is an application server used as a middleware between a web server, e.g. Apache or Nginx, and Ruby making it easy to deploy any Rails application. Also, this document will go through the process of deploying a sample Rails application named rails_app.

Here are the assumptions for this post:

• Installation is done in Ubuntu 12.10+
• Apache2 used as the web server
• A user account with sudo privileges named user is used to execute the commands

Installing Ruby

The first step is to install the required Ruby dependencies.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git-core curl zlib1g-dev build-essential libssl-dev libreadline-dev \
 libyaml-dev libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev
sudo apt-get install libgdbm-dev libncurses5-dev automake libtool bison libffi-dev

Installing the core Ruby software packages can be difficult to do given the incompatibilities between the different versions of it. Fortunately, there are Ruby package managers that simplifies the installation process. A popular package manager, RVM (Ruby Version Manager), will be used to install Ruby and although a single-user installation of RVM is recommended, the server or multi-user installation is done instead.

So, download and set up RVM.

\curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | sudo bash -s stable

An instruction will then show up requiring a user to be added to the rvm group and to run another command. Note too that there may be a need to re-open the shell terminal.

sudo usermod -a -G rvm lees
source /etc/profile.d/rvm.sh

Then, install Ruby using rvm. Ruby 1.9.3 will be used here but you can choose to install any other version.

rvm install 1.9.3
rvm use 1.9.3 --default

Verify the installation by running:

ruby -v

Installing Rails

Several Rails dependencies may require NodeJS, so add an APT repository for it and install.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nodejs

Then, install Rails.

gem install rails

Installing Passenger

First, install the Passenger Ruby gem.

gem install passenger

Then, run the following command. The on-screen instructions are very intuitive and simple to follow. It will also recommend that certain packages may have to be installed first using apt-get.

passenger-install-apache2-module

Create Passenger’s Apache load module configuration.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/mods-available/passenger.load

Type in the following text in one line:

LoadModule passenger_module 
 /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p545/gems/passenger-4.0.40/buildout/apache2/mod_passenger.so

And create too it’s other Apache configuration.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/mods-available/passenger.conf

That will have the following content:

<IfModule mod_passenger.c>
 	PassengerRoot /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p545/gems/passenger-4.0.40
 	PassengerDefaultRuby /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p545/wrappers/ruby
</IfModule>

Enable the Passenger module.

sudo a2enmod passenger

Setting up the Rails Application

Copy the rails_app folder to the user’s home directory (/home/user/rails_app). And run bundle in it.

cd /home/user/rails_app
bundle install

Then, create the Apache site configuration.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/rails_app

Type in the following content replacing the correct ServerName value:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName www.yourhost.com
  DocumentRoot /home/user/rails_app/public

  <Directory /home/user/rails_app/public>
     	# This relaxes Apache security settings.
     	AllowOverride all
     	# MultiViews must be turned off.
     	Options -MultiViews
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Enable the site configuration and restart the Apache server.

sudo a2ensite rails_app
sudo service apache2 restart

Finally, open up the site in the web browser and verify if it’s running fine. And that should be all of it!