setting up ruby on rails with apache

This tutorial will teach you how to go from an empty Debian 7 (Wheezy) server to being able to running Ruby on Rails applications with Apache and Passenger. It is intended for those with a cursory knowledge of Apache and Rails but are apathetic towards server management.

I wrote this tutorial because other, comparable tutorials that only cover some of this are rather verbose, without having all the information in one place. Ironically, this section is pretty verbose, but the rest should be concise.

If you are running a different *nix than Debian 7, adapt the commands as appropriate. Ubuntu and Mint should be almost identical. Some of these numbers/versions may be out of date by the time you are reading this document. Adapt as necessary! No guarantees that it will still work, but it should...

You can click on the headers to hide anything in this tutorial you've already read or don't care about!

Run the following commands to make sure your server is up-to-date:

RVM is the Ruby Version Manager. It's fairly useful for managing your Ruby install. To install it, run the following command:

Afterwards, you will need to restart your shell.

Use RVM to install Ruby. Run the following command:

Use RVM to set the default version of Ruby. Run the following command:

Use Ruby to install rails. Run the following command:

Installing Apache is pretty straightforward. The only interesting part is that you have to install Ruby dependencies.

You can set your default apache page at /var/www/index.html if you want.

Phusion Passenger is what really enables Apache to work with Rails. Unfortunately, it's rather tedious to install, and everyone's experience with it seems to vary. Luckily, once you have it set up, you probably won't have to interact with it again. Run the following commands:

You may have noticed that I included the passenger-install-apache2-module three times. It will provide you with prompts and instructions. Follow these instructions. They are various dependencies that you may need. Run it until it says you are done. It can take awhile. Be strong!

We're almost done. Once you add a site to Apache, you'll be able to query it. I will be using my domain and project, middleendian.com, as an example. Remember to swap it out with your own!

Edit your sites available (I like to use vi(m) to do my editing, but you can use nano, emacs, ed, or whatever you want):

If your projects directory does not already exist, make it. It does not have to be in this location, but it should match the earlier document. Then go to that directory, create your rails project, make your logs directory, and enable your site in apache

Make a test index file in your public directory.

And assuming your DNS is set up, which is outside the scope of this tutorial, when you visit your domain name, a page that says "testing" and has no actual HTML should show up. Almost done...

When you want to make a changes to your project, the will need to be deployed. The fastest way to do this is to have a deploy script in your project directory.

Run the delpoy script with ./deploy in your project directory.

That's all! You now have a maintainable Rails project that works with Apache living on your Linux server.