I spent a good part of a week trying to get rails to work under Apache and then gave up. Now I am giving it a try with lighttpd. To steal some words from Duncan Davidson (see links below):
Lighty is fast. Clean. Easy to compile. Easy to configure.If you have a choice about it, the choice is to use lighty for rails.
Here are some links:
The first thing you will need is the gems system:
tar xzvf rubygems-0.9.0.tgz cd rubygems-0.9.0 su ruby setup.rb
Then you need rails itself, and I jumped right in and set up a demo application and went through the instant gratification example in the "agile" book.
su gem install rails --include-dependencies mkdir /u2/rails cd /u2/rails rails demo
Then as a precursor to getting this to work with lighttpd, I go to my documentroot and do:
cd DocumentRoot ln -s /u2/rails/demo/public rails
get fcgi-2.4.0.tar.gz tar xzvf fcgi-2.4.0.tar.gz cd fcgi-2.4.0 ./configure make make installNote that I do not su to do this. I make sure that /usr/local is owned by me so the make install can put things there when run as an ordinary user. In particular it puts fcgiapp.h into /usr/local/include.
Get ruby-fcgi-0.8.6.tar.gz tar xzvf ruby-fcgi-0.8.6.tar.gz cd ruby-fcgi-0.8.6 ruby install.rb config ruby install.rb setup ruby install.rb install
Several things can go wrong here.
If you have not already installed the fastcgi development kit, it will get into trouble looking for the fastcgi header file: fcgiapp.h.
The install phase will try to put things into /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8 so you will probably need to su or change permissions for that to work.
The linux dyamic load path may not include /usr/local/lib. Test this by running:
irb require "fcgi.so"In my case it failed trying to get libfcgi.so.0. The fix is to edit the file /etc/ld.so.conf, or actually in my case I created a new file /etc/ld.so.conf.d with the single line:
/usr/local/libAnd all was well after doing this and running ldconfig.
I get the index.html page just fine, but any other request just gives me:
Application error
Change this error message for exceptions thrown outside of an action (like in Dispatcher setups or broken Ruby code) in public/500.html
Note that the above is the contents of /u2/rails/demo/public/500.html.
After lots of frustrating experimentation with my lighttpd.conf file setup, I decide I had better check if I can really lauch ruby fastcgi scripts.
I replace /u2/rails/demo/public/dispatch.fcgi with mycgi.fcgi which looks like so:
#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'fcgi'
FCGI.each { |req|
out = req.out
out.print "Content-type: text/plain\r\n"
out.print "\r\n"
out.print "Hello, the time is: ", Time.now.to_s
req.finish
}
This works just fine, telling me that my setup of lighttpd and ruby_fcgi is
entirely healthy. Something however is wrong with my rails setup.
Permission denied - /u2/rails/demo/public/../config/../tmp/sessions//ruby_sess.456505837f37240aWhat I have had to do is the following:
cd /u2/rails/demo chmod a+w log cd /u2/rails/demo/log chmod a+w * cd /u2/rails/demo/tmp chmod a+w *Hurrah!! Now things are cool. I sure wish this was in the manuals.
# lighttpd configuration file
# Just to run rails
#
############ Options you really have to take care of ####################
## modules to load
# at least mod_access and mod_accesslog should be loaded
# all other module should only be loaded if really neccesary
# - saves some time
# - saves memory
server.modules = (
"mod_rewrite",
# "mod_redirect",
# "mod_alias",
"mod_access",
# "mod_cml",
# "mod_trigger_b4_dl",
"mod_auth",
# "mod_status",
# "mod_setenv",
"mod_fastcgi",
# "mod_proxy",
# "mod_simple_vhost",
# "mod_evhost",
# "mod_userdir",
# "mod_cgi",
# "mod_compress",
# "mod_ssi",
# "mod_usertrack",
# "mod_expire",
# "mod_secdownload",
# "mod_rrdtool",
"mod_accesslog" )
## a static document-root, for virtual-hosting take look at the
## server.virtual-* options
server.document-root = "/www/rails/"
## where to send error-messages to
server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/error_log"
# files to check for if .../ is requested
index-file.names = ( "index.php", "index.html",
"index.htm", "default.htm" )
## set the event-handler (read the performance section in the manual)
# server.event-handler = "freebsd-kqueue" # needed on OS X
# mimetype mapping
mimetype.assign = (
".rpm" => "application/x-rpm",
".pdf" => "application/pdf",
".sig" => "application/pgp-signature",
".spl" => "application/futuresplash",
".class" => "application/octet-stream",
".ps" => "application/postscript",
".torrent" => "application/x-bittorrent",
".dvi" => "application/x-dvi",
".gz" => "application/x-gzip",
".pac" => "application/x-ns-proxy-autoconfig",
".swf" => "application/x-shockwave-flash",
".tar.gz" => "application/x-tgz",
".tgz" => "application/x-tgz",
".tar" => "application/x-tar",
".zip" => "application/zip",
".mp3" => "audio/mpeg",
".m3u" => "audio/x-mpegurl",
".wma" => "audio/x-ms-wma",
".wax" => "audio/x-ms-wax",
".ogg" => "application/ogg",
".wav" => "audio/x-wav",
".gif" => "image/gif",
".jpg" => "image/jpeg",
".jpeg" => "image/jpeg",
".png" => "image/png",
".xbm" => "image/x-xbitmap",
".xpm" => "image/x-xpixmap",
".xwd" => "image/x-xwindowdump",
".css" => "text/css",
".html" => "text/html",
".htm" => "text/html",
".js" => "text/javascript",
".asc" => "text/plain",
".c" => "text/plain",
".cpp" => "text/plain",
".log" => "text/plain",
".conf" => "text/plain",
".text" => "text/plain",
".txt" => "text/plain",
".dtd" => "text/xml",
".xml" => "text/xml",
".mpeg" => "video/mpeg",
".mpg" => "video/mpeg",
".mov" => "video/quicktime",
".qt" => "video/quicktime",
".avi" => "video/x-msvideo",
".asf" => "video/x-ms-asf",
".asx" => "video/x-ms-asf",
".wmv" => "video/x-ms-wmv",
".bz2" => "application/x-bzip",
".tbz" => "application/x-bzip-compressed-tar",
".tar.bz2" => "application/x-bzip-compressed-tar"
)
# Use the "Content-Type" extended attribute to obtain mime type if possible
#mimetype.use-xattr = "enable"
## send a different Server: header
## be nice and keep it at lighttpd
# server.tag = "lighttpd"
#### accesslog module
accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/access_log"
######### Options that are good to be but not neccesary to be changed #######
## bind to port (default: 80)
#server.port = 81
## bind to localhost (default: all interfaces)
#server.bind = "grisu.home.kneschke.de"
## to help the rc.scripts
server.pid-file = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid"
## enable debugging
#debug.log-request-header = "enable"
#debug.log-response-header = "enable"
#debug.log-request-handling = "enable"
#debug.log-file-not-found = "enable"
### only root can use these options
#
# chroot() to directory (default: no chroot() )
#server.chroot = "/"
## change uid to (default: don't care)
#server.username = "lighttpd"
server.username = "www"
## change uid to (default: don't care)
#server.groupname = "lighttpd"
server.groupname = "www"
# Setup for rails
url.rewrite = ( "^/$" => "index.html", "^([^.]+)$" => "$1.html" )
# Any file that exists with extension .fcgi would do here.
server.error-handler-404 = "/mycgi.fcgi"
#### fastcgi module
## read fastcgi.txt for more info
fastcgi.server = ( ".fcgi" =>
((
"min-procs" => 4,
"max-procs" => 10,
"socket" => "/tmp/rails.fastcgi.socket",
"bin-path" => "/u2/rails/demo/public/dispatch.fcgi",
## "bin-path" => "/u2/rails/demo/public/mycgi.fcgi",
"bin-environment" => ( "RAILS_ENV" => "development" )
))
)
# END
Ruby on Rails notes / tom@mmto.org