Passenger stack, zero to hero in under five minutes

Scripts for Sprinkle, the provisioning tool

Watch the demo screen cast of passenger-stack.

How to get your sprinkle on:

• Get a brand spanking new slice / host (Ubuntu please)
• Create yourself a user, add yourself to the /etc/sudoers file
• Set your slices url / ip address in deploy.rb (config/deploy.rb.example provided)
• Set username in config/deploy.rb if it isn't the same as your local machine (config/deploy.rb.example provided)

From your local system (from the passenger-stack directory), run:

sprinkle -c -s config/install.rb

After you've waited for everything to run, you should have a provisioned slice. Go forth and install your custom configurations, add vhosts and other VPS paraphernalia.

My app isn't running!?

No superfluous configuation is included, these scripts focus purely on slice installation. Having said that passenger is configured to work with apache, your application should pretty much be a 'drop in' install.

Read these tips to get you humming

Other things you should probably consider:

• Close everything except for port 80 and 22
• Disallow password logins and use a passphrased RSA key

Wait, what does all this install?

• Apache (Apt)
  • Scripts and stylesheets are compressed using mod_deflate
  • ETags are applied to static assets
  • Expires headers are applied to static assets
• Ruby Enterprise (Source) [includes rubygems]
• Passenger (Rubygem)
• Memcached (Apt)
• Libmemcached (Source)
• MySQL (Apt) or PostgreSQL (Apt)
• MySQL or PostgreSQL ruby database drivers (Rubygem)
• Git (Apt)

Requirements

• Ruby
• Capistrano
• Sprinkle (github.com/crafterm/sprinkle)
• An Ubuntu based VPS (known to not work on Debian Etch†)

Thanks

• Marcus Crafter and other Sprinkle contributors
• Slicehost, for giving a free slice for testing passenger stack
• Nathan de Vries for Postgres support
• Anthony Kolber for the github pages design
• Stephen Eley for some sanity checks on git dependencies

Disclaimer

Don't run this on a system that has already been deemed "in production", its not malicious, but there is a fair chance that you'll ass something up monumentally. You have been warned.

Footnotes

† This issue lies between differences in apt between debian and ubuntu, my feedback has been forwarded and discussed with Marcus, the author of sprinkle. I believe he is looking into it.