WebFaction Rails Stack

The accompanying shell script will automatically build and configure your own private Ruby on Rails/Merb stack. It was written with WebFaction users in mind, but is more or less generic aside from a few minor details. Essentially, the directories $HOME/logs/user and $HOME/webapps/$APP_NAME must exist before running the script.

What's Provided

• Ruby 1.8.7 (latest from the 1.8.7 subversion branch)
• RubyGems 1.3.1 (plus subsequent updates, if any)
• Gems: rails, merb, mongrel, mongrel_cluster, thin, capistrano, termios, ferret, acts_as_ferret, god, sqlite3-ruby, mysql, and typo
• Git 1.6.1
• nginx 0.6.34 (with nginx-upstream-fair module for fair load balancing)
• Monit 4.10.1
• Startup scripts and working default configuration files for monit and nginx

Before Running the Script

1. Create a rails app from the WebFaction control panel. Leave the autostart box unchecked.
2. Create an app of type "custom application (listing on port)" from the WebFaction control panel. Name it monit.
3. Assign values to the four variables at the beginning of the script: PREFIX, APP_NAME, APP_PORT, and MONIT_PORT.
   • PREFIX is the installation path prefix. It is the location of your "private application environment". It should be somewhere in your home directory. It has a default value of $HOME/apps. You could make it $HOME, but the home directory contains things that are better off separate. With a compartmentalized PREFIX like $HOME/apps, if you aren't happy with your setup, you could simply kill the monit, nginx, and thin processes, execute rm -rf $HOME/apps and start over fresh.
   • APP_NAME is the name of the app created in step one. The path $HOME/webapps/$APP_NAME should exist and contain at least a skeleton app. The default value for APP_NAME is typo.
   • APP_PORT is the port WebFaction assigned to the app created in step one. The default value is 4000.
   • MONIT_PORT is the port WebFaction assigned to the app created in step two. The default value is 4002.

After Running the Script

If no unforeseen errors occurred, your rails app will be up and running in production mode. Of course, $HOME/webapps/$APP_NAME must contain a valid app for this to be true, even if it's just a skeleton. The working default configuration sets up two thin instances listening on unix sockets (mongrel does not have this capability) with nginx as the fair load balancing reverse proxy. Monit watches nginx and the thin servers. A crontab entry ensures that your setup springs back to life when the server has to reboot. There are a couple of optional things you should do:

1. Inspect the nginx and monit conf files to learn how they work. Modify them as you like.
2. Generate ssl certificates and create an nginx https vhost following my example file if you have a dedicated IP address for https traffic.

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