Using Ruby On Rails With Apache2 On Debian Etch

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme

This article shows how you can install Ruby on Rails (RoR) and integrate it in Apache2 on a Debian Etch system (including a short section at the end showing how to use RoR in a web site created with ISPConfig). Ruby on Rails is a web application framework which is rapidly gaining popularity among web programmers. It aims to increase the speed and ease with which database-driven web sites can be created and offers skeleton code frameworks (scaffolding) from the outset. Applications using the RoR framework are developed using the Model-View-Controller design pattern.

This document comes without warranty of any kind! I want to say that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

I will use the hostname testapplication.example.com in this tutorial for the virtual host running Ruby on Rails.

2 Installing Ruby And Rails

In order to install Ruby and Ruby on Rails, we simply run

apt-get install ruby libzlib-ruby rdoc irb rubygems rails eruby

3 Installing Apache2 And mod-fcgid

Ruby on Rails can be integrated in Apache2 using mod-fcgid. Therefore we install the following packages:

apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-fcgid libfcgi-ruby1.8

Afterwards, we enable a few Apache modules:

a2enmod ssl
a2enmod rewrite
a2enmod suexec
a2enmod include

and reload Apache:

/etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

4 Installing MySQL And The Ruby MySQL Bindings

Most probably you or your users will like to create database-driven Ruby on Rails applications, therefore we install the MySQL server and the Ruby MySQL bindings now:

apt-get install libmysql-ruby mysql-server

You should set a root password for MySQL now:

mysqladmin -u root password yourrootsqlpassword

If MySQL is listening not only on 127.0.0.1, but on other addresses as well (e.g. server1.example.com), you should set a root password for these addresses as well:

mysqladmin -h server1.example.com -u root password yourrootsqlpassword

5 Creating Our Ruby On Rails Environment

We can now create a directory in which we want to develop our future RoR applications. I'd like to develop them in /var/rails, so I create that directory now:

mkdir /var/rails

Apache2 should have read/write access to that directory, so we make the Apache user (www-data on Debian) and Apache group (again www-data) the owner and group of that directory:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/rails

Now we can create our first RoR application which we will call testapplication. We will create testapplication under the user www-data so that Apache has read/write access to it:

cd /var/rails
su -m www-data

Now that we're logged in as www-data, we run

rails testapplication

This will create a directory called testapplication within /var/rails that contains all directories and files we need to develop our RoR application.

Next, we type in

exit

to become the root user again.