[HOW TO] Install a RubyOnRails app on a Site5 account

[dom974]

I don't know where to put this guide exactly so I'm starting here

Basically, I am assuming you're developing your RubyOnRails application on your computer first (and you access it with http://127.0.0.1:3000).

Here are the steps to have a decent RoR app running with Site5 (without FastCGI unfortunately, we're still waiting to have it on all the servers).

1/ Open a SSH session and go at the root of your personal directory (place where you can see the directory public_html).

2/ Type

rails name_of_your_application

You have now declared a new RoR application

3/ Using FTP, upload the following directories:

• app
• public
• config

They should contain all the files created (but upload also the other directories if you have created files in other dir than the ones listed)

4/ Now let's create a symbolic link:

cd ~
ln -s your_app/public/ public_html/your_app_another_name

Note: It's important to have your application name pointing to a different name, I don't know why but otherwise the system gets crazy having to symlink with similar names
Note(2): The idea is to move away your application files from public users, especially the config files. That's the reason why we're creating the app at the root of the user home directory and creating a link to access only the public dir.

5/ We have to declare the symlinks by creating the .htaccess file:

vi public_html/.htaccess

Add these lines:

Options +FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI
RewriteEngine On

6/ Next step is to modify the permissions (make the files executable)

chmod -R 755  your_app/*

7/ Edit your public/dispatch.cgi file and replace the first line like this:
replace #!/usr/bin/ruby18 with #!/usr/bin/ruby
At this stage you may want to test the installation by visiting the address:
http://www.your_domain.com/your_other_app_name/
or http://www.your_domain.com:3000/your_other_app_name/
You should obtain the congratulations page of the server running perfectly well .

8/ Once you're done testing this, we're gonna create a simple route to display a page as the index page (like an index.html or index.php page)
First delete the index.html in the public dir unless you want to use it

rm your_app/public/index.html

Then,

vi your_app/config/routes.rb

On top of all the routes, add:

map.connect '', :controller => 'your_controller', :action => 'action_to_be_seen_as_index'

9/ Finally, edit the environment.rb file to put the app into production mode:

vi your_app/config/environment.rb

add the following line before the RAILS_ENV declaration, like this:

ENV['RAILS_ENV'] = "production"
RAILS_ENV  = ENV['RAILS_ENV']

Now, you should be allright and ready to show your work to the rest of the world !
You will be able to access the index page by typing:
http://www.your_domain.com/your_another_app_name/
Fortunately, you won't experience issues. I may forget some parts or putting some steps that are not exactly in accordance with your system configuration. Please forgive me if I made some mistakes, I'm no "RubyOnRails guru"
I'm ready to hear comments, suggestions or troubles !

Cheers,
Dominique.

[Steven Byrd]

Dominique, great info. Thanks! I've stuck this thread and moved it to the Ruby Forum.

[dom974]

My pleasure Steven ! Thanks moving the thread, I didn't notice the ruby forum at first

[KelliShaver]

Edit: Nevermind... *sigh* the problem occured because I was trying to create a symlink to a directory that already existed. Like I said, stupid user error... maybe my mistake will help someone else, though.

Thanks for posting this. I'm having a problem, though. I'm sure it's stupid user error on my part. I can't get my symlink to work.

I've set up the rails app directory as "AddressBook" inside my home directory, and I'm trying to point it to public_html/dev using the following:

ln -s AddressBook/public/ public_html/dev

I've added the necessary lines to my .htaccess file, and I've set the proper file permissions on AddressBook/*

As you can see, though.... It's not working:
http://www.kellishaver.com/dev/

Any ideas?

[Heikki]

I got my symlink working after I used full paths from root.

Now I have other problem:
Pages display fine except none of the images show up. The images are in public/images -folder. Any idea what might cause this?

-- edit
Well.. I figured it out. The images paths are now wrong.
/images/logo.jpg should be /(symlink name)/images/logo.jpg

Isn't there easier way to deal with this than to rewrite all the image paths?

-- edit #2

Ok. I solved that too by following the instructions here:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/sh...InstallOnSite5

So I renamed public_html to public_html_back and created a symlink public_html.

[alfa]

I have never coded in my entire life. What is this about? How do I get ssh? O.o

[David Felstead]

Originally Posted by alfa

I have never coded in my entire life. What is this about? How do I get ssh? O.o

Hi alfa - if you're on Mac OS X or Linux, ssh will already be installed as a command line utility - simply type: 'ssh yourusername@yourbox.site5.com' at the command line to use SSH (substituting 'yourusername' and 'yourbox' appropriately ). For windows, PuTTY is a great SSH client.

[alfa]

Originally Posted by David Felstead

Hi alfa - if you're on Mac OS X or Linux, ssh will already be installed as a command line utility - simply type: 'ssh yourusername@yourbox.site5.com' at the command line to use SSH (substituting 'yourusername' and 'yourbox' appropriately ). For windows, PuTTY is a great SSH client.

hey thanks! what is your box, btw? :P

[David Felstead]

Originally Posted by alfa

hey thanks! what is your box, btw? :P

That's the name of the site5 server your site is hosted on - stacia, hypnos, leto, etc... You should be able to ssh to username@yourdomain.com as well - you'll see the name of the box in the welcome message there.

Hope that helps!

[bbebop]

taking the first steps to install an RoR app on site5. after entering "rails appname" at the command line, i'm getting the following error message:

/usr/bin/ruby: error while loading shared libraries: libruby.so.1.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

any suggestions? thanks.

[Steven Byrd]

I believe you'll have to contact Customer Service to get that fixed as that lib doesn't seem to be installed.

[orangekay]

A lot of people seem to be having problems installing Rails apps via the symlink method since they stripped down environment.rb and created the Initializer class in version 0.14.whatever. If you KNOW for a fact that you've done everything else right and are still getting "Premature end of script headers" errors in your logs and generic 500 error pages when you try to load your app, an additional step is necessary when you lack the administrative access necessary to add the relevant Alias directive to your httpd.conf file. I have not seen this documented anywhere, but a quick skim of the code in initializer.rb shows what the problem is.

boot.rb determines the root directory of the application with one line of code:

root_path = File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '..')

This translates into "Move up one directory from the directory boot.rb is in", and when that directory is a symlink, it's going to go back up to the document root holding said symlink rather than the Rails root holding the symlinked "public" directory that actually contains all the relevant files. Luckily, they have wrapped this code up in a conditional so it won't run if RAILS_ROOT is defined before it runs. All you need to do is define RAILS_ROOT at the top of your environment.rb file, setting it to the absolute path to your application's directory (NOT the public directory, the application's root directory that you created the first time you ran the rails command) i.e.

RAILS_ROOT = '/home/mydomaincom/myrailsapp/'

Good place to stick that is right after the

ENV['RAILS_ENV'] = 'production'

line. Worked for me.

EDIT: Or you can alternatively pass true to Pathname#cleanpath on line 5 of boot.rb so it reads

root_path = Pathname.new(root_path).cleanpath(true).to_s

[bbebop]

Has anyone successfully installed Instiki on Site5? A brief tutorial would be very, very helpful. Thanks!

[dbtanner]

To clarify the symbolic link problem, here's what instruction line #4 should say:
cd ~
ln -s /home/your_username/your_app/public/ public_html/your_app_another_name

Otherwise the sym link doesn't have enough information.

[Lancer]

Does anyone know how to set this up with Subversion? I want to be able to make the repository in a directory like /home/user_name/svn and have it symlink to /home/user_name/public_html/svn .

[Steven Byrd]

Originally Posted by Lancer

Does anyone know how to set this up with Subversion? I want to be able to make the repository in a directory like /home/user_name/svn and have it symlink to /home/user_name/public_html/svn .

Wouldn't a

ln -s ~/public_html/svn ~/svn

do?

[Lancer]

Nope, and anyway that defeats the purpose of symlinking.. that would expose parts of the repository I don't want to expose. Even if it did work, it would not be a practical solution.

I'm actually have a pending support ticket about this with the reseller staff, we've been back and forth about the issue but can't come up with a solution.. This would be a BIG thing if we could get it working.. even bigger if it's possible with my resold accounts.

[Lancer]

I've decided not to use subversion o well...

In other news, Line #4 should be modified in the post so that when people are actually following the directions, they don't have to scroll down the post to find out why the symlink didn't work.

[Lancer]

Well, everything worked fine until I followed the steps after #7. Now I get the notorious

Application error
Rails application failed to start properly"

error

http://www.desire2design.com/ca/

[chenggao]

While installing Mailr, I followed this post, and I found that
1 symlink is ok, and need no absolute dir, just
ln -s ~/railsapp/public public_html/railsapp
is ok.
2 if rails app need be accessed as http://site.com/railsapp/, add
RAILS_ROOT = '/home/mydomaincom/myrailsapp/'
to environment.rb works.