Installing Ruby Enterprise Edition with Phusion Passenger

Eric — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:00:18 +0000

I've been using Phusion Passenger for a few months now and I'm really pleased with it. The performace vs. Mongrel is better, but what makes it so useful is the ease of deployment. Being able to setup a vhost in Apache just like you would for a PHP application was very appealing to me. Having previously worked with the Apache/Rails/Mongrel/mod_proxy stack in an "enterprise" environment for over a year, I have experienced pretty much every nightmare deployment scenario possible. I recently decided to install Phusion's Ruby Enterprise Edition, which promises up to a 33% savings in memory usage.

Before you do anything, and to save you trouble down the road, I recommend generating a list of all the gems currently installed. You'll need this later because you'll have to reinstall all of them in Ruby Enterprise Edition.

$ gem list

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

actionmailer (2.0.2)
actionpack (2.0.2)
activerecord (2.0.2)
activeresource (2.0.2)
activesupport (2.0.2)
acts_as_taggable (2.0.2)
amazon-ecs (0.5.3)
cgi_multipart_eof_fix (2.5.0)
daemons (1.0.10)
fastthread (1.0.1)
gem_plugin (0.2.3)
hpricot (0.6)
mongrel (1.1.4)
mysql (2.7)
passenger (1.0.1)
rails (2.0.2)
rake (0.8.1)
rspec (1.1.3)
will_paginate (2.2.2)
xml-simple (1.0.11)

Copy your list and save it somewhere. Next, we download and extract the current version of Ruby Enterprise Edition. The latest version number can be found at the download page.

$ wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/48623/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215.tar.gz

And run the installer

$ ./ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/installer

As the installation proceeds, you'll be prompted for an installation directory. I went with the default. When the installation is over, you should see a message like this:

Ruby Enterprise Edition is successfully installed!
If want to use Phusion Passenger (http://www.modrails.com) in combination
with Ruby Enterprise Edition, then you must reinstall Phusion Passenger against
Ruby Enterprise Edition, as follows:

/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/bin/passenger-install-apache2-module

Make sure you don't forget to paste the Apache configuration directives that
the installer gives you.

If you ever want to uninstall Ruby Enterprise Edition, simply remove this
directory:

/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215

If you have any questions, feel free to visit our website:

http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com

Enjoy Ruby Enterprise Edition, a product of Phusion (www.phusion.nl)

I do want to use Ruby Enterprise Edition and Apache, so I immediately installed the Apache module.

$ /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/bin/passenger-install-apache2-module

You need to pay attention to the Apache directives that this installation generates, since you'll have to put them into your httpd.conf:

The Apache 2 module was successfully installed.

Please edit your Apache configuration file, and add these lines:

LoadModule passenger_module /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.6/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.6
PassengerRuby /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/bin/ruby

What that message doesn't explain is that, if you previously installed Passenger without Ruby Enterprise Edition, you need to comment out any old directives attached to that previous setup. I made that mistake the first time around.

Next you have to reinstall all the gems that you were using with old Ruby, including Rails:

/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/bin/ruby /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/bin/gem install rails --version 2.0.2

Just to prove my point, if you listed all of Enterprise Ruby's gems at this point, the list would look something like this:

$ /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/bin/ruby /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/bin/gem list

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

actionmailer (2.2.2, 2.0.2)
actionpack (2.2.2, 2.0.2)
activerecord (2.2.2, 2.0.2)
activeresource (2.2.2, 2.0.2)
activesupport (2.2.2, 2.0.2)
fastthread (1.0.1)
mysql (2.7)
passenger (2.0.6)
rack (0.9.1)
rails (2.2.2, 2.0.2)
rake (0.8.3)

None of my old gems are installed. Once Rails is installed, you need to reinstall your old gems:

$ /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/bin/ruby /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/bin/gem install will_paginate
$ /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/bin/ruby /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/bin/gem install xml-simple
$ /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/bin/ruby /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/bin/gem install hpricot
$ /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/bin/ruby /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/bin/gem install rmagick

And on and on. If you haven't used Passenger before, check out the Deployment Guide. If you have used Passenger and your Rails apps are already set up in Apache to take advantage of it's deployment procedures, simply restart Apache.

Ruby On Rails and SliceHost Part 1: Initial Setup

Eric — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 20:42:54 +0000

I recently purchased a VPS from SliceHost.com. After ruling out a shared host and deciding on a VPS setup, SliceHost seemed to offer the most for my money. My initial setup is the 256slice, which offers 256mb RAM, 10GB of storage, and 100GB of bandwidth for $20 a month. Being able to build my own stack from scratch is very appealing, especially as most of my side projects are written in Rails. My goal was to have Apache 2.2 as a front-end server, proxying requests to mongrel or a cluster of mongrels, with MySQL 5.0 as the database. Of course I also wanted to have Ruby 1.8.6 and Rails 2.0.2. Another useful, though optional, tool is phpMyAdmin. I am also using CentOS 5.0, first because of my familiarity with it and second because it's well documented and supported. The following is the first of a multipart tutorial about how I set this all up. In future installments I will detail how to secure and optimize each installation as well as enable Apache proxying and mongrel clustering.

Change the default root password

>passwd

Update all yum packages

>yum update

Bring in some standard packages

>yum install wget openssl-devel lynx zlib zlib-devel vixie-cron curl lynx subversion make gcc automake

Install Apache

>yum install httpd

Setup your domain records
http://articles.slicehost.com/2007/10/24/creating-dns-records

Create your VirtualHosts in Apache's httpd.conf
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts
Note: Apache's conf directory will be /etc/httpd/conf. Don't forget to restart Apache after setting up each new vhost:

>service httpd restart

See http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/docs/apache.html for details on how to get Apache and mongrel to play with each other.

Start Apache

>httpd service start

Install MySQL

>yum install mysql mysql-server

See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/ for post-installation instructions (setting up initial accounts, etc.)

Install Ruby (1.8.6)

>wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6-p111.tar.gz
>gzip -d ruby-1.8.6-p111.tar.gz
>tar xvf ruby-1.8.6-p111.tar.gz
>cd ruby-1.8.6-p111.tar.gz
>./configure
>make
>make install

Install Ruby Gems (1.0.1)

>wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/29548/rubygems-1.0.1.tgz
>tar xvf rubygems-1.0.1.tgz
>cd rubygems-1.0.1.tgz
>ruby setup.rb

Install Rails (2.0.2)

>gem install rails --include-dependencies

Install Mongrel

>gem install mongrel

Optional for phpMyAdmin
Install php

>yum install php

Install php extensions necessary for phpMyAdmin

>yum install php-mcrypt
>yum install php-mbstring

Install phpmyadmin
http://www.phpmyadmin.net/documentation/#setup

Any comments or feedback is appreciated.

Perplexed Labs » apache

Installing Ruby Enterprise Edition with Phusion Passenger

Ruby On Rails and SliceHost Part 1: Initial Setup