http://www.johnyerhot.com/myrailsapp

Of course Nginx makes it super easy to do so. If you need to get your webserver ready with Nginx, PHP running as a FCGI instance, and Rails check out my other how to.  

Now, onward!

First create a new virtual host.  In my case, for yerhot.org it would look like this:
server {
listen 80;
server_name yerhot.org;
access_log /var/www/yerhot.org/logs/access.log;
error_log /var/www/yerhot.org/logs/error.log;
location / {
root /var/www/yerhot.org/;
index index.html;
}
}
Pretty simple setup, telling Nginx to listen on port 80 for requests for yerhot.org, where to store logs, and finally setting up the site root at /var/www/yerhot.org.

All we would have to do to have Nginx redirect to our Rails app when looking for yerhot.org/myrailsapp is make another location block (in other words, place this right before the last curly brace).

location /myrailsapp {
proxy_pass http://localhost:8000;
}
Now, all requests for /myrailsapp will get proxied to port 8000. Now fire up your Rails app on port 8000.
mongrel_rails start -e production -p 8000 -d
Restart Nginx:
/etc/init.d/nginx stop
/etc/init.d/nginx start
And….

Crap. Rails is looking for a ‘myrailsapp’ route, which there is none.  No, no, don’t create one – we’ll need to use a little known feature of Mongrel to fix the problem.. the prefix.
Stop Mongrel…
mongrel_rails stop
And try this:
mongrel_rails start -e production -p 8000 -d --prefix=/myrailsapp

And… your app should fire right up. Pretty neat, if you wanted to you could use it forward to a Mongrel Cluster, a FCGI instance of PHP (from my other post), or lots of stuff.

In a previous post I talked about how I just set up my new Slicehost account using Nginx to power this blog (Wordpress – PHP) and some Rails Apps. Here’s a mini how to on how I got the whole thing working, as its not quite as easy as it sounds.

First though – Why not use Apache + mod_proxy… There is a ton of documentation out there for Apache, and the majority of the web runs on it?

Well, Nginx is super tiny and super light weight and super fast. If you are in a situation like many people who are using Slicehost and a 256 MB slice, Apache has too big a resource foot print. If you are a Rails guy (or gal) Apache is just used as a proxy to send requests to Mongrel and Apache will just use resources that could be used else where. Nginx is stable, well supported, and growing in popularity. Plus the name is cool.. NGINX.. yeah…

This will (should) work with a fresh install of Ubuntu Server 7.10, but as always YMMV.

A lot of this is adapted from a great post on How To Forge, thanks 3uropa.

Install only the OpenSSH packages NOT the LAMP packages when installing Ubuntu Server 7.10. You’ll have to setup networking for whatever your situation is so can’t help you there. If you have a Slicehost slice, don’t do anything. :)

Once that is finished installing Ubuntu Server, the first thing you want to do is update and get some prerequisites out of the way!

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install build-essential

Ok. Now, you need to go in and get all your files/directories in order. That mean, go to /var/www/ (or wherever) and make directories for your PHP site. In my case, I used /home/joyerhot/public_html/johnyerhot.com/wordpress as the root of my Wordpress blog. You should be able to either use wget to grab stuff or SFTP in with your username and password.

Ok. Next we will install PHP5 and MySQL

apt-get install php5-cli php5-cgi build-essential mysql-server mysql-client libmysqlclitene15-dev

Now, lets get Nginx while we’re at it! The version that is in Ubuntu’s repos is old and not cool, so we’ll manually grab a newer version:

wget http://technokracy.net/nginx/nginx_0.5.32~grrr-1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg nginx_*

And now Nginx is running and listening to port 8000.. we’ll change that later though.

Now, here is where it gets sticky. You are going to create and edit /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/mysite

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/mysite

and put in it the following, changing directories and whatnot to what is appropriate for you.

server {

listen 80;
server_name yourdomain.com;
rewrite ^/(.*) http://www.yourdomain.com permanent;

}

server {

listen 80;
server_name www.yourdomain.com;

access_log /home/joyerhot/public_html/yourdomain.com/logs/access.log;
error_log /home/joyerhot/public_html/yourdomain.com/logs/error.log;

if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+)?(/wp-.*) $2 last;
rewrite ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+)?(/.*\.php)$ $2 last;
rewrite ^ /index.php last;
}

location / {

root /home/joyerhot/public_html/johnyerhot.com/wordpress;
index index.html index.php index.htm;

}

# pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
#
location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /home/joyerhot/public_html/yourdomain.com/wordpress/$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI $request_uri;
fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_URI $document_uri;
fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT $document_root;
fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL $server_protocol;
fastcgi_param GATEWAY_INTERFACE CGI/1.1;
fastcgi_param SERVER_SOFTWARE nginx;
fastcgi_param REMOTE_ADDR $remote_addr;
fastcgi_param REMOTE_PORT $remote_port;
fastcgi_param SERVER_ADDR $server_addr;
fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT $server_port;
fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME $server_name;
}
}

WHEW! There is A LOT of stuff there! This will setup a Virtual Host for your PHP site, and enable rewrites (for pretty urls). Here is what you need to change in yours though:

1. the server_name is whatever your domain is.
2. rewrite ^/(.*) http://www.whatever_goes_here.com permanent;
3. access_log directory
4. error_log directory
5. root directory
6. fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /path/to/your/php/app/root/$fastcgi_script_name;
7. MAKE SURE YOU’RE LISTENING TO PORT 80.

Ok, now we’ll get PHP5 working as a fcgi process. To do this, we need to grab some of Lighttpd.

wget http://www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.4.18.tar.bz2
tar -xvjf lighttpd-*
cd lighttpd*
./configure
make

DO NOT “make install”. :)

sudo cp src/spawn-fcgi /usr/bin/spawn-fcgi
sudo nano /usr/bin/php-fastcgi

Now, add the following into php-fastcgi:

/usr/bin/spawn-fcgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 9000 -C 2 -u www-data -f /usr/bin/php5-cgi

-C controls how many fcgi instances of PHP5 are spawned, so you can put however many are appropriate for you in there. I only needed 2.

sudo nano /etc/init.d/init-fastcgi

And add:

#!/bin/bash
PHP_SCRIPT=/usr/bin/php-fastcgi
RETVAL=0
case “$1″ in
start)
$PHP_SCRIPT
RETVAL=$?
;;
stop)
killall -9 php
RETVAL=$?
;;
restart)
killall -9 php
$PHP_SCRIPT
RETVAL=$?
;;
*)
echo “Usage: php-fastcgi {start|stop|restart}”
exit 1
;;
esac
exit $RETVAL

Do some permission magic:

sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/init-fastcgi
sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/php-fastcgi

Now, you can make sure everything is working by:

/etc/init.d/init-fastcgi start
top #then shift + M

You should see a couple of PHP5 fcgi processes! YAY!
Finally, we want them to start on reboots and whatnot so…

update-rc.d init-fastcgi defaults

Ok, now lets restart Nginx and see if things are working!

/etc/init.d/nginx restart

You should be able to hit your Php app now!

Now for Ruby and friends!

sudo apt-get install libmysql-ruby1.8 ruby1.8-dev ruby1.8 ri1.8 rdoc1.8 irb1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8 libruby1.8 libopenssl-ruby irb1.8 libdbd-mysql-perl libdbi-perl libmysql-ruby1.8 libmysqlclient15-dev libmysqlclient15off libnet-daemon-perl libopenssl-ruby libopenssl-ruby1.8 libplrpc-perl libreadline-ruby1.8 libruby1.8 mysql-client mysql-client-5.0 mysql-common mysql-server mysql-server-5.0 rdoc1.8 ri1.8 ruby1.8 ruby1.8-dev zlib1g-dev

And you might need to create some symlinks (I had to), thanks Vince Wadhwanl.

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ruby1.8 /usr/local/bin/ruby
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/rdoc1.8 /usr/local/bin/rdoc
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ri1.8 /usr/local/bin/ri
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/irb1.8 /usr/local/bin/irb

Make sure things are working ok…

ruby -v

You should get that you have 1.8.6 installed.Ok, now lets install RubyGems.

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/29548/rubygems-1.0.1.tgz
tar xvzf rubygems-1.0.1.tgz
cd rubygems-1.0.1
sudo ruby setup.rb
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem

And finally for Rails and Mongrel:

sudo gem install rails
sudo gem install mongrel mongrel_cluster

You can now set up a mongrel_cluster or whatever you need. There’s plenty of tutorials out there for that, so Google is your friend. The rest will assume you have your Rails app up and running on port 3000.
We now have to set up a site profile for Nginx for your mongrel_cluster.

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/rails_app

And add to it, once again changing the relevant parts….

upstream domain1 {
server 127.0.0.1:3000;
}

server {

listen 80;
server_name www.your2nddomain.com;
rewrite ^/(.*) http://subdomain.your2nddomain.com permanent;

}

server {

listen 80;
server_name subdomain.your2nddomain.com;

access_log /home/joyerhot/public_html/your2nddomain.com/logs/access.log;
error_log /home/joyerhot/public_html/your2nddomain.com/logs/error.log;

location / {

root /home/joyerhot/public_html/your2nddomain.com/public/RAILS_ROOT/public/;
index index.html;
location / {
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_redirect false;

if (-f $request_filename/index.html) {
rewrite (.*) $1/index.html break;
}

if (-f $request_filename.html) {
rewrite (.*) $1.html break;
}

if (!-f $request_filename) {
proxy_pass http://domain1;
break;
}
}

}

}

Again, heres what you need to change:
1. server_name should be the domain
2. In this case the “rewrite” line will point to subdomain.your2nddomain.com, you should prolly just put your domain here(www.your2nddomain.com).
3. access_log directory
4. error_log directory
5. root directory (pointing to RAILS_ROOT/public)

That’s it! You should now restart Nginx (/etc/init.d/nginx restart) and when you should have everything working! You’ve got Virtual Hosts setup with PHP running as Fast CGI on one domain and Ruby On Rails on the other!

I’m sure I’ve got a typo or two in here and a mistake here and there, please leave a message if this worked or didn’t work for you. Remember, this is the process I went through getting everything working on my Slicehost Slice and another server at work, both running Ubuntu 7.10.

PS. Here is one little nugget of info that may be helpful – Your MySQL socket file location (for your RAILS_ROOT/config/database.yml file) is located at /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock. I didn’t realize this at first. :)

As mentioned, I decided to give Nginx a try. I have to admit, initial set up is very easy.  I first setup the Rails enviornment and had Nginx proxy to two mongrels for each app.  (I’m running two apps for four total Mongrels).  No problem.

Next, I had to get php working.  Not so easy.

I ended up looking for help and followed this, setting up php5 to run as fast-cgi.  Ugh.  To make things worse, I had to move over the Wordpress install from Godaddy.  I assummed it would be easy as pie, and it was to an extent, but I ran into trouble with the way the virtual hosts configs nginx uses handle subdomains and .. long story short I had redirect loop happening and it just sucked.

I’m blabering on and on here, but in the end I’ve got everything up and running.  We’ll see how Nginx works in the long term, but right now it seems pretty snappy and the memory footprint is much smaller than Apache.

So, Royner and another project of mine have a place to live and I’m just gonna do some final tweaks this weekend and then you can check them out.