Pick a Host and Sign Up

While I already have several hosts for other website work, I decided to find one with dedicated experience in Rails hosting (which none of mine have). I read around the web, looked at a number of hosts' sites, and considered my options. Different people have different opinions, needs, priorities, and experiences.

I ended up looking seriously at 2 options: slicehost.com, which gives you a virtual machine with root access to setup and destroy as you wish; and hostingrails.com, a more turnkey service with a cPanel, etc. For now, my priority is to get up quickly to experience the full develop, debug, deploy cycle, without getting too caught up in the server side details.

A basic account on hostingrails.com is only $3.59 per month (a cup of coffee and bagel). I get a shared IP, 5gb disk, and 20gb/mo bandwidth to use as my sandbox. Signup was instant. I created a subdomain in my registrar for this host, e.g. rails.myserver.com and pointed it to my new IP.

Establish SSH Key

ref: http://www.hostingrails.com/forums/wiki_thread/27

Connect to server, and accept the fingerprint:

local$ ssh 'user@rails.myserver.com'

server$ exit  

If file doesn't exist ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub , create one now: (accept defaults, just press enter when prompted)

local$ ssh-keygen -t dsa

Copy key to ther server

local$ ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub user@rails.myserver.com 

Oops, I dont have this command on my mac. Here's the manual steps. If ~/.ssh doesn't exist on the server, create it and copy over the id_dsa.pub file:

server$ mkdir ~/.ssh

local$ scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub user@rails.myserver.com:.ssh/authorized_keys 

However, if ~/.ssh/authorized_keys exists on the server then you need to append it instead:

local$ scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub user@rails.myserver.com:homebox_dsa.pub

server$ cat homebox_dsa.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys

server$ rm homebox_dsa.pub 

Manual Deploy

First, I'll deploy my first Rails app manually (later I'll setup Capistrano). I'm setting up the host for a single app, for now (especially since that's how most of the wiki doc's on hostingrails are written), and then redo it for multiple domains and/or subdirectories.

ref: http://www.hostingrails.com/forums/wiki_thread/1

1. Copy over the database

I won't go into explanations here. I'm using mySQL5 on both systems. You can do this through GUI tools (phpMyAdmin, CocoaSql) or via command line. On the server, create the database, create a user, assign user to database with permissions, then load the schema (and data, if you want). For example,

local$ mysqldump -p --opt myproject_development >myproject.sql

local$ scp myproject.sql user@rails.myserver.com

server$ mysql -u hruser_dbuser -p hruser_dbname <myproject.sql

2. Create online versions of config files

Here's how hostingrails recommends keeping track of server versions of these files: create copies named environment.rb.online and database.yml.online.

database.yml.online only needs to contain:

production:
  adapter: mysql
  database: [your_hostingrails_username]_[your_database_name]
  username: [your_hostingrails_username]_[your_database_username]
  password: your_password

and in environment.rb.online uncomment the line:

ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'production'

Also, change .htaccess to use dispatch.fcgi (from dispatch.cgi)

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]

and comment out this line at the top:

# AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi

3. Generate empty Rails app on server

server$ rails myproject

4. Upload only the folders and files needed by the app

• whole app folder
• stuff in public/ incuding images/, javascripts/, stylesheets/, .htaccess
  
• config/database.yml.online, config/environment.rb.online

5. Make public folder public_html

server$ mv ~/public_html ~/public_html_backup

server$ ln -s ~/apps/myproject/public ~/public_html

6. Restart your server process and go

server$ killall -usrl dispatch.fcgi

link browser to the server (e.g. http://rails.myserver.com) TaaDa! (fingers crossed). If problems, check the log/production.log file

Setting Up Capistrano

Capistrano lets you control all your server side setup and processes from your local machine's command line. First I do a generic Capistrano install.

ref: http://www.hostingrails.com/forums/wiki_thread/5

local$ sudo gem install termios

local$ sudo gem install -y capistrano 

Capistrano-ize my app

local$ cd myproject

local$ cap --apply-to .

That creates the files config/deploy.rb and lib/tasks/capistrano.rake

Configure for a single project on a single server. In deploy.rb, set vars as needed:

set :domain, "rails.myserver.com" 

set :user, "myaccount"

set :application, "myproject"

set :deploy_to, "/home/#{user}/apps/#{application}" 

set :rails_env, :production

set :chmod755, %w(app config db lib public vendor script tmp public/dispatch.cgi public/dispatch.fcgi public/dispatch.rb)

set :use_sudo, false

roles:

role :web, domain

role :app, domain

role :db,  domain, :primary => true

Capistrano + local svn

OK. Now, my objective is to deploy from my local Subversion repository. (Although it's more common to deploy from a shared svn repos over the Internet, I'm keeping my repos local because a) i dont need to share them right now, and b) i have a relatively slow internet connection).

ref: http://blog.wolfman.com/articles/2006/12/06/a-capistrano-scm-module-for-local-svn-access

Download this, de-tar, and put the 2 files into lib/tasks/:

http://blog.wolfman.com/files/local_subversion_with_rsync_3.tar.gz

Add these lines to deploy.rb (change your paths as needed):

require 'lib/tasks/local_subversion_rsync.rb'
set :scm, Capistrano::SCM::LocalSubversionRsync
set :repository_is_not_reachable_from_remote, true

set :tmpdir_local, "/Users/me/temp"
set :tmpdir_remote, "/home/user/tmp"

set :repository, "file:///Users/jonathan/svn/myproject/trunk"; 

[ssh option]

Add fcgi tasks (for Mongrel see the wolfman post).

# FCGI TASKS

desc "FCGI is already running, so we don't really need the spinner script, but we have it create the initial symlink for us"
task :spinner, :roles => :app do
  run "rm -rf /home/#{user}/public_html;ln -s #{current_path}/public /home/#{user}/public_html"
end

desc "Restart the FCGI Process"
task :restart, :roles => :app do
  run "cd #{current_path}; killall dispatch.fcgi"
  cleanup
end 

# GENERAL TASKS

desc "Set the proper permissions for directories and files on HostingRails accounts"
task :after_deploy do
  chmod755.each do |item|
    run "chmod 755 #{current_path}/#{item}"
  end
end 

Cap Deploy

Do this once, the first time.

local$ cap setup

local$ cap cold_deploy

Then anytime you have a new release to deploy

local$ cap deploy

or

local$ cap deploy_with_migrations

There's some final fixup that I have to do manually. These should be integrated into this process, but I'll leave that for another day.

server$ cd ~/apps/myproject/config

server$ mv database.yml.online database.yml

server$ mv environment.rb.online environment.rb

Lastly, the public/dispatch.fcgi got overwritten and has the ruby path on my mac rather than the server, so change the first line to:

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby

OK. Let's restart the server and go

local$ cap restart

Browse to your site.

(Again, crossing your fingers might help, although it can get in the way of typing on the keyboard).