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Ruby Rails Mongrel Apache Easy

October 31st, 2006

Having attempted to set ruby on rails up many times, this is by far my favourite soloution and it also happens to be the simplest. Why did i go the mongrel route? Well because FastCgi with Apache make me want to cry. Its buggy (especially on fedora and CentOS) and its a pain in the ass to setup. Where as mongrel on the other hand is a piece of cake.

In theory you could run mongrel, bind it to port 80 and do away with apache all together. There are a few reasons why i don’t wanna do this:

1. I like apache, although its a bit of a resource hog its a solid and secure webserver, has tons of great features and a large community behind it.

2. The other stuff I’ll be running on the server is made up of static pages and other CGI scripts for which I still believe apache is the best option.

In order to serve a rails application on the default port 80 we will use apaches mod_proxy to forward requests to the mongrel server sitting on  custom ports. To improve the performance its best to run more than once instance of the mongrel server and make use of apaches mod_proxy_balancer.

In order for this to work you’ll require a server running apache 2.2 and yum (or apt-get if your running a debian flavour).

Installing ruby

yum install ruby ruby-devel
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/11289/rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
tar -xzf rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
cd rubygems-0.9.0
ruby setup.rb

Installing mongrel

gem install mongrel

Building a test rails application

mkdir /var/www/rails
cd /var/www/rails
rails mytest

Starting mongrel

adduser mongrel
cd mytest
chown -R :mongrel *
su mongrel
mongrel_rails start -d -p 3001 -P log/mongrel1.pid
mongrel_rails start -d -p 3002 -P log/mongrel2.pid
mongrel_rails start -d -p 3003 -P log/mongrel3.pid

Make sure you start mongrel in the root directory of your rails project. If successful we now have three mongrel instances. To verify type ps -aux | grep mongrel

Configuring Apache

You’ll need to add the following code to your httpd.conf file

#define mongrel cluster
<proxy balancer://mongrelcluster>
  BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3001
  BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3002
  BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3003
</proxy>
 
#forward requests to mongrel cluster
<virtualhost *:80>
  ServerName yourdomain.com
  ServerAlias www.yourdomain.com
  ProxyPass / balancer://mongrelcluster/
  ProxyPassReverse / balancer://mongrelcluster/
  ProxyPreserveHost on
</virtualhost>

Finally navigate to yourdomain.com and you should see the ‘Welcome Aboard’ default rails page.

Tags: Linux | Ruby on Rails