Automatic Rails on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

enjoyingrails — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:32:11 +0000

A couple of weeks ago there was a post on the FiveRuns blog about automatically installing the Rails stack on an Ubuntu 8.04 VPS.

I prefer to use Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition when running my Rails app, so inspired by the FiveRuns script I wrote my own version – here is the gist on github.

#!/bin/bash # Inspired by http://blog.fiveruns.com/2008/9/24/rails-automation-at-slicehost


apt-get update

apt-get upgrade -y

apt-get -y install build-essential libssl-dev libreadline5-dev zlib1g-dev

apt-get -y install mysql-server libmysqlclient15-dev mysql-client

apt-get -y install ruby ruby1.8-dev irb ri rdoc libopenssl-ruby1.8 
RUBYGEMS="rubygems-1.3.0"

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/43985/$RUBYGEMS.tgz

tar xzf $RUBYGEMS.tgz

cd $RUBYGEMS

ruby setup.rb

cd ..
# Install Ruby Enterprise Edition

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/41040/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810.tar.gz

tar xvzf ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810.tar.gz

yes '' | ./ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/installer
# Install Passenger

/usr/bin/gem1.8 install -v=2.0.3 passenger --no-rdoc --no-ri

apt-get -y install apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-prefork-dev

yes '' | passenger-install-apache2-module 
# Create sample Rails app

/usr/bin/gem1.8 install rails --no-rdoc --no-ri

cd /var/www

rails -d mysql hello

cd hello

./script/generate controller welcome hello

echo "Hello World" > app/views/welcome/hello.html.erb

rake db:create RAILS_ENV=production
# Create the Apache2 Passenger module files

cat >> /etc/apache2/mods-available/passenger.load <> /etc/apache2/mods-available/passenger.conf <<-EOF
  PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.3

  PassengerRuby /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/bin/ruby
EOF

a2enmod passenger
# Create a site file for the sample Rails app

IP_ADDRESS=`ifconfig eth0 | sed -n 's/.*dr:\(.*\)  Bc.*/\1/p'`

cat >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/hello <<-EOF
      ServerName www.yourhost.com

      DocumentRoot /var/www/hello/public
EOF

a2ensite hello

# That's it! reboot

The script assumes that you have ssh access as root to a clean Ubuntu 8.04 install.

The script will install

Ruby 1.8.6
RubyGems 1.3.0
Passenger 2.0.3
Ruby Enterprise Edition 20080810
Apache 2.2.8
MySQL 5.0.51a
A sample Rails app

Note that the Passenger installer will install the latest Rails (2.1.1) and a bunch of other useful gems.

Assuming that your server IP address is 192.168.185.128 you can run it like this:
ssh root@192.168.185.128 "wget -O - http://gist.github.com/raw/16225/a6a16b3a38cd3486679b96fa0f3446e58f3b8423 | sed -e s/$'\r'//g > install.sh; /bin/bash install.sh; rm install.sh"
Sit back and enjoy – in less than ten minutes you will have the full Rails stack and a sample Rails app running. Take a look at it on http://192.168.185.128/welcome/hello

Creating an Amazon EC2 Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server edition image

enjoyingrails — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 16:04:39 +0000

Last week I decided to try out Amazon EC2 mainly for running and testing Rails applications and so far it has been great fun!

This blog posting describes how I created an Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server edition image for use with Amazon EC2.

Download and install the EC2 command line tools
curl -O http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip mkdir ~/.ec2 cd ~/.ec2 unzip ec2-api-tools.zip ln -s ec2-api-tools-1.2-13740 ec2-api-tools

Set the environment variables necessary to run the tools
export EC2_HOME=~/.ec2/ec2-api-tools export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home/
Download your private key and certificate from your Amazon Web Services account to the ~/.ec2 folder.

Generate a key pair
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=~/.ec2/pk-8WU9XGOPO65IKA7O96M2KEKVOS5288KU.pem export EC2_CERT=~/.ec2/cert-8WU9XGOPO65IKA7O96M2KEKVOS5288KU.pem mkdir ~/.ec2 ec2-add-keypair gsg-keypair > ~/.ec2/id_rsa-gsg-keypair chmod 600 ~..ec2/id_rsa-gsg-keypair

Launch a Fedora Core 4: Base instance.
ec2-run-instances ami-20b65349 -k gsg-keypair
This returns an instance number like i-9536dcfc.

Try running
ec2-describe-instances i-9536dcfc
until the status returned is no longer ‘pending’ but ‘running’.

Allow ssh access and log in
ec2-authorize default -p 22 ssh -i ~/.ec2/id_rsa-gsg-keypair root@ec2-67-202-21-218.compute-1.amazonaws.com

On the EC2 instance run
wget http://erichsen.net/blog/fc4-base chmod 755 fc4-base ./fc4-base
fc4-base is a script found in this forum posting. I adapted it to create an Ubuntu 6.06 image instead of 6.10.

After the script has finished execution copy the private key and certificate from the local machine to the EC2 instance
scp -i ~/.ec2/id_rsa-gsg-keypair ~/.ec2/pk-8WU9XGOPO65IKA7O96M2KEKVOS5288KU.pem root@ec2-67-202-21-218.compute-1.amazonaws.com:/root/ scp -i ~/.ec2/id_rsa-gsg-keypair ~/.ec2/cert-8WU9XGOPO65IKA7O96M2KEKVOS5288KU.pem root@ec2-67-202-21-218.compute-1.amazonaws.com:/root/

Create an image and sign it with the private key
ec2-bundle-image -i /mnt/ubuntu606base.img -k /root/pk-8WU9XGOPO65IKA7O96M2KEKVOS5288KU.pem -c cert-8WU9XGOPO65IKA7O96M2KEKVOS5288KU.pem -u '5171-9220-6573'

The image must be stored on S3 so I create a bucket (from my local Mac)
sudo gem i aws-s3 -y export AMAZON_ACCESS_KEY_ID="1IQ8AHOAWNRDMQOI91ZK" export AMAZON_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="VCddmbA9C4D8w/mw6aLZjzCkMoEyx5EUvouJdY/4" s3sh Bucket.create('erichsen.net')

On the EC2 instance I upload the image
ec2-upload-bundle -b erichsen.net -m /tmp/ubuntu606base.img.manifest.xml -a '1IQ8AHOAWNRDMQOI91ZK' -s 'VCddmbA9C4D8w/mw6aLZjzCkMoEyx5EUvouJdY/4'

From my local Mac I register the instance and that’s it!
ec2-register erichsen.net/ubuntu606base.img.manifest.xml

The ec2-register returns an AMI id – in this case ami-4acd2823. Let’s try it out
ec2-run-instances ami-4acd2823 -k gsg-keypair ec2-describe-instances i-9536dcfc ssh -i ~/.ec2/id_rsa-gsg-keypair root@ec2-67-202-24-151.compute-1.amazonaws.com

YES! I was able to ssh into an EC2 instance running my Ubuntu 6.06 image! Note that the ssh configuration of the image is not the best – it allows root logins which is not in general a good idea.

Hope this helps someone else wanting to play with Ubuntu on EC2.

Enjoying Rails » Ubuntu

Automatic Rails on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

Creating an Amazon EC2 Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server edition image