Presentation for CleRB 06-05-2013

1. 06.04.2013
Hosting A Rails App

2. Why am I presenting this?
• Level Seven
• Support a bunch of
production rails apps
• Biggest has between 20-
30 boxes of various types
• Still learning

3. We’re Hiring!
• Ya i know, who isn’t?
• Full time ruby on rails
• Happy to help someone pick
up their first real rails gig
• Also we like contractors and
independents

4. Hosting Options
• Heroku
• Great for new/young
projects
• Easy to manage
• Gets expensive quick
• Pretty inflexible, very little
control
• AWS
• More complicated setup
• Can also get expensive but
easier to control (YMMV)
• Awesome set of tools that all
play well together
• You need to know or be a
sysadmin

5. Free Micro Instance
• Everything in this presentation you can try out for yourself for free
• Amazon Free Tier
• Free Micro EC2 Instance, 1 static IP, 30 gig EBS space and a load
balancer plus a bunch of other stuff
• http://aws.amazon.com/free/
• Any code / scripts will be on github and these slides will be on
slideshare. I’ll tweet their location after the talk.
• I have a bunch of hidden slides that screenshot the amazon setup
process too

6. Step 0: Assumptions & Spinup
• We’ll be using an Ubuntu 12.01 instance. It’s a default in AWS.
• This guide is really Amazon stack heavy. I’ve worked with it, heroku
and rackspace (a little) so if you have questions I’m happy to try and
help.
• You should setup an elastic IP on your server right away for easy of
use, but I’ll talk about it later on.

7. Step 0: Assumptions & Spinup
• First spinup a new instance on EC2 using Ubuntu 13.04
• Ideally add a 2nd EBS volume with additional storage space
• Associate an Elastic IP with that box
• Setup a new Host record in ~/.ssh/config for the new server
Host ClerbDemo
HostName 107.20.194.126
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/AWSJosh.pem
ForwardAgent yes
• That last line will be important later

8. Step 1 - Dependencies
• Install the various libraries and dev tools you’ll need to install the rest
of the server
> sudo apt-get -y update #update apt to the latest packages
> sudo apt-get -y install build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev
libreadline-dev libyaml-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev curl git-core python-
software-properties libxslt-dev libxml2-dev imagemagick pdftk
openjdk-7-jre-headless
• Install NodeJS for Asset Pipeline
> sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:chris-lea/node.js
> sudo apt-get -y update
> sudo apt-get -y install nodejs

9. Step 1 - Dependencies
• Make your life better by disabling rdoc and ri installation for gems
> sudo echo “gem: --no-ri --no-rdoc” >> ~/.gemrc
> echo “gem: --no-ri --no-rdoc” >> ~/.gemrc
• Set your timezone (optional, maybe you want UTC)
>sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata #We use America/New York

10. Step 2 - Ruby
• 2 Ways to install, from source or via a system-wide RVM install
• RVM is really only useful if you plan on having multiple rubies
• Passenger 4 supports this and may result in me changing my
defaults pretty soon
• For now we’ll go with source
> wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/2.0/ruby-2.0.0-p0.tar.gz
> tar -xzvf ruby-2.0.0-p0.tar.gz
> cd ruby-2.0.0-p0
> ./configure
> make
> sudo make install
• dd

11. Step 3 - Web Server
• Lots of choices. Apache or Nginx w/ Passenger, Thin, Unicorn, etc.
• We’ll go with Apache w/ Passenger
• I REALLY like nginx but I haven’t used it enough yet
> sudo apt-get install apache2 apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-
prefork-dev
> sudo gem install passenger
> sudo passenger-install-apache2-module
# Follow instructions on screen

12. Step 3 - Web Server
• Setup the modules you’ll need
> sudo a2enmod ssl
> sudo a2enmod rewrite
> sudo a2enmod headers
> sudo a2enmod expires
> sudo a2enmod passenger
• We’ll need a virtual host for the site but we’ll do that later once we
have the code out there for the first time
• I like to setup the folder paths now though
> sudo mkdir /srv/www
> sudo chown ubuntu /srv/www
> sudo chgrp ubuntu /srv/www

13. Step 4 - Database
• Tons of options, popular ones include Postgres, MySQL for RDBMS
or MongoDB as NoSQL Alternative
• If you like MySQL you could use Amazon’s RDS Service
• We’ll go with PSQL for now
> sudo touch /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list
> sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/
precise-pgdg main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list'
>wget --quiet -O -
http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ACCC4CF8.asc | sudo apt-key
add -
> sudo apt-get -y update
> sudo apt-get -y install postgresql-9.2
• If your using a different DB and App server you have to modify the
postgres config to allow remote connections

14. Step 5 - DNS & IP Addresses
• For AWS your server will need an elastic IP
• You’ll need to setup that address in DNS, lots of options here:
• I recommend either Amazon’s Route 53 or DNSimple
• Both have great APIs, allow a lot of flexibility and aren’t Godaddy
• Setup an A Record to point to the IP address you got from amazon

15. Deployment
• Most rails apps on custom servers use capistrano
• https://help.github.com/articles/deploying-with-capistrano
• In short add capistano to your gemfile, bundle install, then:
> capify .
• Update the config/deploy.rb with your server info and path you want
the code

16. Deployment
• cap deploy:setup to create folder structure
• cap deploy:check to verify
• At this point you should make sure you database.yml file is on the
server in the proper place
• cap deploy
• cap deploy:migrations to deploy and run all migrations

17. Deployment
• You need a custom cap task for running asset pipeline generation
• You can support multiple environments using
capistrano/ext/multistage
• I like to build a cap task to copy the real db config into my project
post-deploy and not store production un/pw info in git

18. Stuff I Forgot Earlier
• You need to create a vhost in /etc/apache2/sites-available
• Also make sure your security group allows traffic on port 80

19. Stuff I didn’t cover
• Failover including load balancing
• Caching solutions like Varnish or advanced nginx caching
• Proxy server configurations
• Database replication or failover
• Backup
• Lots of other stuff...

20. References
• My Demo App
• https://github.com/JoshReedSchramm/HostingRailsDemoApp
• The Server Setup Script
• https://github.com/JoshReedSchramm/HostingRailsDemoApp/blob
/master/doc/setupscript.txt
• These Slides
• Some crazy slideshare url

21. Questions & Contact
• @JoshReedSchramm
• josh.schramm@gmail.com
or
josh.schramm@lvlsvn.com