John Yerhot

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. :)

Backgroundrb is a great tool for getting cron like functionality in your Rails app, but it can be a pain if its not working correctly. I’m not going to go into how to get backgroundrb working, its rubyforge page has decent instructions for that, but what I will share are some tips on debugging a non-working worker.

Obviously check your RAILS_ROOT/log and check backgroundrb.log, backgroundrb_server.log, and backgroundrb_debug.log. I’ve found backgroundrb.log most useful, but many times I’ll restart backgroundrb by

script/backgroundrb stop

script/backgroundrb start #restart doesn’t work for me

and nothing will happen. Check your backgroundrb_server.log file and you may see that the ‘address is already in use”.

Type “top” into your command line (on a Linux system) and then press shift+M. You should get a nice list of services running and you’ll more than likely have a couple of rubys on there. For some reason backgroundrb doesn’t stop all the time when you tell it to and I’ve had to kill -9 the rubys and then restart backgroundrb and mongrel.

You may also notice that the backgroundrb ruby instance uses ALOT of memory! Make sure you have

:environment: production

in your backgroundrb.yml file in RAILS_ROOT/config. Otherwise backgroundrb is working in development mode.

Finally, to debug an syntax or other error try this.

1. open 2 command lines.

2. start your rails app with ruby script/server. Make sure to start it in development mode and not using mongrel_rails.

3. start backgroundrb in the other terminal.

4. watch the first terminal and you can see what background rb is doing and where exactly it gets messed up.

You can do this by monitoring the log file or tailing it, but I like this better and it provides you with more info.

Hope this helps any of you out.

Well, after a little bit of down time and some re-adjusting my slice at slicehost we’re back and I’ve gotten Royner up and running at royner.johnyerhot.com.

What is Royner?

Good question. Well, you sign up with either a Google Talk (Gtalk) or Jabber instant message screen name, give Royner a url for a RSS/ATOM feed (i.e. Feedburner)

Please give me some feed back on Royner. I didn’t put tons and tons of hours into Royner (the majority on Backgroundrb, which is working beautifully now), but I’d like to keep it alive if the demand is there.

There are some to-do’s left:

Set Royner up so that you can respond to IM’s with “OK” or something and Royner will quit looking for that key word.

Hasta pasta

Well I’ve finished consolodating my two hosting accounts, one at Godaddy (cheap Linux hosting) and my shared Rails hosting at OcsSolutions (which was very good for shared Rails host) to a 512 mb Ubuntu 7.10 ’slice’ at Slicehost.  Was gonna go straight Debian, but figured what the hell.  For any of you who don’t know, a ’slice’ is pretty much get VPS hosting account.  This is my first VPS.  I set up Apache/Rails proxy servers and your run of the mill LAMP servers for customers/clients and at work all the time, but this is MY first server that is all mine to mess with.

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.

Heres the week in review:

-Linux Mint home networking is now done and working beautifully. Had some trouble getting the onboard Via Chrome9 Video working correctly, but I followed the instructions here(compiling it from source) and everything was great. I wanted to use the OpenChrome driver instead of the VESA driver because the OpenChrome one has support for XvMC which accellerates all kinds of video (i.e. Xvid, mpeg4…). Only thing left to do is get a static IP so I can get to my machine from the outside world.

-Royner - I haven’t had much time to work on ironing out any of the kinks before a first release. Hopefully this week will be different. Thinking about Slicehost to host it, as I’ve heard great things about them. I’m also going to try out deprec for deployment, using Nginx instead of Apache. Should be interesting.

Other than thats, its another work week. See ya’ll.

I’m happy to say that I’m almost done with my newest project - Royner. It doesn’t live anywhere yet, just on my local machine, but heres what it is:

Really simple - you give Royner a feed (Atom, RSS, XML) and Royner monitors that feed for some keywords that you define. So, lets say you want to monitor the Slickdeals.net RSS feed of deals for “FAR” (Free after rebate). When something is posted that is free after rebate, Royner will send you an IM letting you know of the deal and the url. You could use it for whatever you want. Monitor blogs, Digg, hell, even your email.

Currently, only Jabber/GTalk is supported since it is the easiest to integrate.

Pretty neat eh?
Heres some screenies. Hopefully it will be ready for the public in a week or so.

The one thing I’ll say is this though - I used backgroundrb to monitor the feeds. Now, once I got it running ok, it worked wonderfully, but I swear it was the most difficult Rails plugin to get working. I spent an ENTIRE day trying to get it to work. In the end, I uninstalled and reinstalled the plugin and that did it. The first time I installed, for some reason an old version was installed and none of the documentation worked. Blah.

First I apologize, I’m watching Rambo III as I write this (preparing for the new Rambo {!!!!!}coming out this Friday) so I may screw some of this up.

This all started with a couple of great deals I saw on slickdeals.net.

1. Got 5 x 1024mb sticks of DDR2 667 Ram for $7 shipped after rebate.
2. Got a cheap (AM2) mATX ASUS mobo, case, and PSU for $50 shipped.

So, I ordered a Athlon X2 4000+ for $55 while I was at it. This got me a cheap as hell backup pc($112 for a dual core PC w/4 gigs ram and an extra stick for a rainy day). I already had a spare optical drive and an old IDE 40gig hard drive to throw at it. I’m not going to be using it for anything needing 3-d acceleration, so I’m going to stick with the onboard video.

Now, a while back I made a MythTV box consisting of the following:

Core 2 Duo e4300
1024mb ddr2 800mhz
2×320gig harddrives
Nvidia 7300gt
DVDRW
pcHDTV tv tuner (for DVR functionality)
running Linux Mint (didn’t have to install all those codecs)
Old Antec case and an Antec Earthwatts PSU (go green).
NOTE: having a HTPC has changed my life. Just like people who have TiVo will tell you, its awesome. I could never go back. You could put together a decent one for $300-400 if you tried and its wayyy worth it.

It works pretty well, and I know that its pretty high powered for a htpc, but I needed it to handle 1080p x264 rips, which the C2D can. I’ve got about 400 gigs of music, movies, and tv rips on it.

So here is the plan:
The new AMD build will be the front end, mainly running Mythtv and the current pc will be Jen’s computer/the server. Right now, I’ve setup Samba shares for all the media, and set up Firefly (aka mt-daapd) to share all the music as an iTunes share (for my Macbook Pro). I’m also going to use it as a Subversion repository.

So, tomorrow the parts for the AMD build will be here and I’ll have to transplant some parts to it - the TV tuner, possibly the vid card (we’ll have to see how the x2 4000+ handles video.. I hope it can handle HD x264 since the 7300gt won’t help with it. I’ll setup a fresh install of Mit + MythTv and be in configuration heaven for the majority of the night I’m guessing.

Stay tuned.

Thats as far as I got tonight. My crappy D-Link router was giving me trouble so I didn’t get as far as I wanted. Wish DD-Wrt would run on it.

Since I started my nice cushy “high paying” job, Jen and I have been putting quite a bit of money away (in preparation for the move and for a rainy day) and paying down our debt.  We’ve got some moola stored away in a ingdirect savings account thats collecting a nice 4.1% interest rate, but I’ve been toying with the idea of playing the stocks.

A couple of months ago I opened a dummy portfolio at money.cnn.com using their ‘live portfolio’ do hickey.  I’ve got next to zero experience with the markets.  Our 403(b) is invested in the Vangaurd S&P 500 Index fund(hey can’t argue with 11% historic returns), but thats about it.  My state pension I really have no control over.  Thats the extent of our investments.   So I opened that dummy account to see what I could do.

Well, the first two weeks were great.  Made about 10% with my mostly tech stock portfolio.  The last two weeks, I’ve lost all that 10% and then another 10.  So I’m down right now.  Kind of glad it is fake money at this point, but I think this summer, when I’m hoping the market bottoms out, I’ll be ready to actually drop a couple grand on a real portfolio and get some good stocks for cheap.

I must admit I’m learning a ton.  I’ve actually begun watching CNBC in the moring before work, bought Jim Cramer’s new book, and check the portfolio about 3-4 times a day.  Its fun if anything.

Its a sad day. My iPod finally quit on me. I’m not exactly sure what is wrong with it, but it has served me well(3 years!).

Oh well, guess that means I should get an Touch. Or I could just do the cool thing and get an iPhone, but then I’d have to switch to AT&T or hack the iPhone to work with T-Mobile. I like my cheap-as-hell-but-oh-so-awesome plan with Sprint I have now though. $30 for unlimited text, data, and 500 minutes isn’t bad. Besides, I don’t use my cell enough to justify it.

Farewell iPod, you were my best friend for a long time.

Yeah, I came up with this little Rails rake task called ‘rake leaves’. It will just create a text file that has all your tables, column names, and their data types. I’ve always thought it would be handy to have this so you don’t need to switch to MySQL and spend the time to look it up.

Anyways, if you want to download it go for it. All you need to do is put leaves.rake in /lib/tasks and then from the console

$rake leaves

You’ll get a file called table_structure_whatever_the_date_is.txt.
You can download if right here.