Deploying Rails on Dreamhost with Phusion Passenger
Deploying Ruby on Rails has always been a pain, even with tools like Mongrel and Capistrano. On shared hosting, it’s nearly impossible. A little while ago, I noticed a project called Phusion Passenger (aka mod_rails), which sought to make deploying as easy as uploading your application to your webhost. A few days ago, Dreamhost (my host) announced on their blog that Phusion Passenger was available on their servers. Naturally, I took some time to play around with it, and so far I’ve been extremely impressed. I threw together a quick app using Viddler.rb and deployed it to Dreamhost (you can see it here). Here’s a quick guide on how to deploy to Dreamhost yourself using mod_rails.
Getting set up
The first thing to do is to set up your domain or subdomain to use Passenger. Just go to the Manage Domains page on the DH web panel, and either create a new domain or edit an existing one. Check the “Ruby on Rails Passenger (mod_rails)?” checkbox and set the web directory to where the public directory of your app will be. Below is a screenshot of my settings for viddler.fidgeting.net.
Next, you need to create your database, so just go into the Manage MySQL section of the panel. Create your database, which should be named as a production database. In my case, it was viddler_production. Then, make sure to change your database.yml to reflect the database you just created.
Uploading and running your application
Before uploading, make sure the first line of your public/dispatch.fcgi has the correct path to ruby on Dreamhost (which is /usr/bin/ruby). Then all you need to do is upload the files to Dreamhost and go to the domain. That’s it—your app is now completely functional. Amazing, huh?
If you need to first run migrations, you can do that from SSH with this command:
RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate
If you need to restart your application (anytime you change any files), just run the following command via SSH:
touch tmp/restart.txt
Getting Gems to work on Dreamhost
Since Dreamhost is a shared host, you can’t directly install gems on the server. Dreamhost’s wiki has a lot of information on different ways to get gems working, but they are all fairly involved, and I couldn’t get any of them to work. The way I did it was by unpacking the gems into vendor/gems by using the “gem unpack” command:
gem unpack <GEM NAME>
I’m sure there are better ways to do it, but this method worked perfectly for me.
Overall Impressions
Like I said at the beginning, I’m very impressed with Passenger, and so far I haven’t noticed any issues. The total time for me to deploy was about 20 minutes: way faster than with Mongrel or FastCGI. It’s definitely awesome to see a host as large as Dreamhost using this, and hopefully soon more will follow suit.
30 Comments
Colin Devroe 21 May 2008 at 8:45AM
Superb write up.
Laurent Kretz 27 May 2008 at 1:16PM
Hello Kyle, Thanks for that very easy tutorial !
I am having an issue, and it might be linked to the dispatch.fgci ruby address …
The home page of my app is fine, it’s the “Welcome aboard” default page, but when i navigate to a specific action (ex: mySite.com/myController/myMethod/ ) i get a “Ruby on Rails version ‘1.1.2’ not found” error …
In the dispatch file, how exactly should the address be writter (maybe i have a path or synthax prob) ?
Kyle 27 May 2008 at 1:23PM
Hm, I don’t think that’s a dispatch.fcgi error. It seems like your app is requiring a earlier version of Rails (1.1.2). Check your config/environment.rb and see what RAILS_GEM_VERSION is set to. For me it’s “2.0.2” (the newest version). You might need to freeze rails–check out this tutorial on how to do it.
1.1.2 is a pretty old version, so you probably want to upgrade to the newest…
Laurent Kretz 27 May 2008 at 2:04PM
Hi again, Thanks for answering, but obviously there’s something else, my baby app seems to not “boot” on the server (as it works perfectly on my local machine)… Will reply if I understand why and how I fix it, for future readers !
Ryan 10 Jul 2008 at 10:15AM
Great write-up, I’m trying it out now. However, I am still pretty new to setting up production environments. When using this method of deploying an app to Dreamhost, can I still use Subversion to update the app, rollback, etc. ?
Kyle 10 Jul 2008 at 10:18AM
Ryan: Absolutely! If you’re using Capistrano, you just have to change the restart task to create the restart.txt file:
http://tomcopeland.blogs.com/juniordeveloper/2008/05/mod_rails-and-c.html
Ryan 10 Jul 2008 at 10:41AM
Hmmm… I thought by using mod_rails, then I didn’t have to use Cap? I’m obviously confused.
Also, I enabled mod_rails, setup mysql db, uploaded the project to the public folder on my ftp, so now http://trinity.tefcwindsor.org/ just shows the index (I have to migrate the db). So I ran: rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=”production”
But I still get an access denied error. Even though I swear my yml file is setup with the correct production permissions.
Kyle 10 Jul 2008 at 10:53AM
Ryan: Capistrano is just a tool to make deploying easier–it checks out the source from SVN, keeps copies so you can roll back, etc. It doesn’t have to do as much work when deploying with mod_rails, but I still find it useful.
Also, make sure your domain is pointed at your /public directory, otherwise it won’t work. Right now it doesn’t seem to be set up that way.
I’m not sure what the issue is with migrating, maybe sending Dreamhost a support message might help? I know they helped me with a couple things when I started using Passenger.
Ryan 10 Jul 2008 at 11:18AM
“Before uploading, make sure the first line of your public/dispatch.fcgi has the correct path to ruby on Dreamhost (which is /usr/bin/ruby).”
This may sound silly, but I’m looking at my dispatch.fcgi file, and I don’t see where I should input that path for Ruby….
When I try to run Cap deploy, everything seems to be working file, then at the end I get an error saying it can’t find the Rake File and it seems to be looking in usr/lib/ruby
Kyle 10 Jul 2008 at 11:35AM
The very first line of dispatch.fcgi needs to be this:
Ryan 10 Jul 2008 at 1:45PM
Ok, I’ve added that…. But when using “deploy” in capistrano, I still get the following:
[Note: I edited this so the code displayed a little nicer -Kyle]
Kyle 10 Jul 2008 at 1:49PM
Hm, is there a file named Rakefile there? Maybe you forgot to commit it to your repository? Without that, rake doesn’t know about the Rials rake tasks.
Ryan 10 Jul 2008 at 1:53PM
Well, if I understand the error correctly, it’s looking for the rake gem in ‘usr/lib/ruby’ when it should be looking for it in ‘usr/bin/ruby’ correct?
Kyle 10 Jul 2008 at 2:04PM
Ryan: I don’t think so. There should be a Rakefile in your app directory (releases/20080710160648/ in the error you posted above)
Ryan 10 Jul 2008 at 2:07PM
Ok, I just looked in that folder, there is no rakefile. So what did I do wrong? haha.
Do I have to copy over a rakefile manually? Or is it a setting I have messed up? Because I do have a rakefile in my local project folder.
Kyle 10 Jul 2008 at 2:09PM
The Rakefile is created automatically when you do rails <myapp>. Not sure how it got lost on deployment, but yeah, just copy it from your local folder.
Ryan 10 Jul 2008 at 3:13PM
Man…unfortunately I’m really confused on how to get this stuff working. I copied over the rakefile, so I don’t get that error anymore.
I created a “rails” directory and uploaded the “trinity” project to that directory. And the subdomain trinity.tefcwindsor.org is pointed towards rails/trinity/public
So I go to: http://trinity.tefcwindsor.org and I get a 500 internal server error.
Any thoughts?
Kyle 10 Jul 2008 at 3:15PM
Hm, at this point, I’m really not sure. I’d recommend looking through your log files (current/logs/production.log) and see if anythings there. Also, maybe send a support ticket to Dreamhost. They might be able to help more than I can.
Ryan 10 Jul 2008 at 4:10PM
Kyle, It looks like maybe I have a problem with my migrations. I ran the RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate command, and when I look at PHPmyAdmin to see what it migrated, it only copied the tables, but no records. Now, in my development database (sqlite3) I have many records for users and each page of the application, so I think that’s why my app is really messing up.
Am I missing something here? Shouldn’t running the rake db:migrate command also copy over the records for each table, along with the tables themselves?
Kyle 10 Jul 2008 at 4:17PM
rake db:migrate just runs the migrations that you’ve created, it doesn’t insert data (it just creates the structure).
Ryan 10 Jul 2008 at 4:22PM
Ok, I understand that now. How do I copy over the records in the database (not just the structure)? I’m reading about “bootstrap” but when I run the rake db:bootstrap command, I get this error:
rake aborted! Don’t know how to build task ‘db:bootstrap’
Kyle 10 Jul 2008 at 8:50PM
Hm, I’m really not sure. I’d look through the Rails API doc and google some. You also might get help in the rubyonrails IRC channel.
Ryan 10 Jul 2008 at 10:23PM
Kyle, I actually found a good tutorial that showed me how to do that here: http://alistairisrael.wordpress.com/2007/09/07/using-rails-console-to-copy-records-across-databases/
So now the Rails app is actually working! I had to delete the htaccess file. And now the app is running fairly snappy, and my stylesheets and images, etc. are all available.
Now my only problem is getting Subversion to play nice with mod_rails. You can view my app at: http://trinity.tefcwindsor.org/
The Subversion directory I setup is at: http://trinity.tefcwindsor.org/trin089/
The problem is, Rails is trying to execute “trin089” as a controller action. So apart from just creating my repository on a different domain (which I don’t want to do), I can’t think of any solutions. So I can’t get capistrano to work until I get a functioning repository.
Baber 09 Sep 2008 at 5:25AM
I hope you can help me out… I have trying to deploy my rails application with no success for a whole week.. Now I keep getting this error
undefined method `include_root_in_json=’
and several others like these Is this some issue with the GEMs or something? Kindly help me out!
Kyle 09 Sep 2008 at 9:21AM
Baber: I’m not quite sure what the issue might be, but at first glance, it’s probably a Gem you forgot to include, so the method you’re trying to use doesn’t exist.
Jeffrey 01 Oct 2008 at 5:26PM
Hi Kyle, I was wondering if you could offer some advice. I’ve unpacked a gem to my project in /vendor/gems, but when trying to run script/runner it can’t find the gem I copied over. After unpacking the gem, is there anything else I need to do? I tried adding this line to my environment.rb,
ENV[“GEM_PATH”]=’home/user/site/vendor/gems:/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8’
Is there anything else I can try? Did you have trouble getting Dreamhost to recognize your gems in the bash environment?
Kyle 01 Oct 2008 at 10:35PM
Jeffrey: I haven’t tried script/runner on Dreamhost yet, though in your
ENV["GEM_PATH"]line, you don’t have a slash before the “home”, maybe that’s the issue?owen 07 Oct 2008 at 10:02PM
thanks for the great tutorial! just signed up with dreamhost today (and used your code :) )
Kyle 07 Oct 2008 at 10:27PM
Owen: Glad it helped you out!
Gustavo Scanferla 12 Jun 2009 at 2:58PM
This post helped me too =)