Setting up medium ruby server

Posted by balepc
on Tuesday, March 23

In this article I’m going to share some techniques of configuring typical Ruby/RoR server. I’ll skip all steps on installing OS, so lets just assume that we have Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server 64bit installed out of the box with SSH account.

Plan

  1. Setting up server
  2. Installing ruby/rails
  3. Installing necessary gems
  4. Setting up application
  5. Moving data

1. Setting up server

  • Users set up
  • Setting up SSH
  • Setting up public keys
  • Set up time/timezone

1.1 Users set up

First I need to create a user for deploying and accessing server, lets call it ‘deploy’ user. 
  sudo adduser --home /home/deploy deploy
It’s a good practice to select complicated password for you accounts, here is a great password generator I use.

Then add the following line deploy ALL=(ALL) ALL after root ALL=(ALL) ALL to suoders list.

  sudo nano /etc/suoders
Remove all unneeded users. A list of all users you can find at /etc/passwd. User can be deleted by: 
  $ sudo deluser username
Set up user password policies. User policies are changed via chage command. Here is an example: 
   sudo chage -l deploy
   sudo change deploy

For a detailed description of commands refer to the following manual on user management.

1.2 Setting up SSH

All ssh setting are found at /etc/ssh/sshd_config. Basically what I need to change are port, protocol, root access, public key auth. 
  #/etc/ssh/sshd_config
  ...
  Port <b>567</b>
  ...
  Protocol <b>2</b>
  ...
  PermitRootLogin <b>no</b>
  ...
  PubkeyAuthentication <b>yes</b>
  ...
Once you made any changes to ssh, you need to reboot ssh deamon: 
  $ /etc/init.d/ssh restart
  $ exit
  Connection to xx.xx.xx.xx closed.
  $ ssh deploy@xx.xx.xx.xx -p 567

1.3 Setting up public keys

Every time I deploy or access my server, I need to enter long unmemorable password. To avoid that I set up public keys. This is done simply, first you need to generate public key on your site by: 
  home$ ssh-keygen
  home$ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
  ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAqLHM9juBojORQIrIcvo0.......
And then append your ssh-rsa key to authorized_keys (Create ~/.ssh/authorized_keys if file doesn’t exists). 
  cat id_rsa.pub > ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Here is a manual for generating ssh keys.

1.3 Setting up time/timezone

There are actually several ways how to set up time on your server. First one is to set up timezone, which is described here

The other way, which I prefer more, is to change system time: 
  $ hwclock --set --date="YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS" 
  $ hwclock -s

That’s it with server configuration.

2. Installing ruby/rails

  • Installing development libraries
  • Installing RubyEE
  • Install mysql, sphinx, postfix, etc
Before installing ruby, I need to install some dependencies: 
   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install libssl-dev -y
   sudo apt-get install build-essential -y
and some others 
   sudo apt-get -y install git-core -y
   sudo apt-get -y install curl wget -y
   sudo apt-get install libcurl-ocaml-dev -y
   sudo apt-get install mysql-server -y
   sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev -y
   sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-dev make -y 
   sudo apt-get install libjpeg-progs
   sudo apt-get install libmagick9-dev
   sudo apt-get install imagemagick
Setting up sphinx: 
   wget http://www.sphinxsearch.com/downloads/sphinx-0.9.9.tar.gz
   gzip -d sphinx-0.9.9.tar.gz & tar -xvf sphinx-0.9.9.tar
   cd sphinx-0.9.9
   ./configure
   make
   sudo make install
Once this is done, go and download rubyEE, which comes together with nginx or apache, whatever you need. And run the following command: 
    mkdir ~/sources
    cd ~/sources
    wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/68720/ruby-enterprise_1.8.7-2010.01_amd64.deb
    sudo dpkg -i ruby-enterprise_1.8.7-2010.01_amd64.deb
    sudo /usr/local/bin/passenger-install-apache2-module
To get mails sent, I also need a postfix installed. This is simple as 
   sudo apt-get install postfix

This would install ruby,rails and nginx.

3. Installing gems

Here’s just a small list of gems, required by regular rails project.

   sudo gem sources --add http://gems.github.com
   sudo gem install  backup \
        archive-tar-minitar \
        aws-s3 \
        chronic \
        curb \
        fastthread \
        javan-whenever \
        mime-types \
        mysql \
        net-scp \
        net-sftp \
        net-ssh \
        rack \
        ruby-hmac \
        rubyzip

   sudo gem install rmagick -v 2.10.0
   sudo gem install rails -v 2.3.5
   sudo gem install javan-whenever
   sudo gem install daemons

4. Setting up application

First I need to create a folder where my application would be stored. Usually I create it in /opt/applications.

  $ mkdir -p /opt/applications/app_name
  $ cd /opt/applications/app_name/shared

To deploy source code you need to add your public key to github (in case of deploying from github). For more details on public keys and github access this manual.

Before first deploy I prefer setting up MySql and shared folder.

It is a good practice to create a separate MySQL user for you application. This is done simple by:

  $ mysql --user=root database
  mysql> CREATE USER 'deploy'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'some_pass';
  mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'deploy'@'localhost';

Setting up shared folder. Usually there are log, pids and system folder. With all basic configuration files.

  $ cd /opt/application/app_name/shared
  $ mkdir log
  $ mkdir pids
  $ mkdir system
  $ mkdir sphinx
  $ tocuh database.yml    <- production databases username and password

Once you have MySQL installed, it’s time to think about nginx configuration. Here is a typical nginx configuration for my applications (/opt/nginx/conf/nginx.onf).

Another useful thing for nginx is a init.d deamon file.

Add nginx to startup on reboot:

  $ sudo crontab -e
  @reboot /etc/init.d/nginx start

Next, I should set up postfix.

And MySQL config with some optimisations.

So, once, we are done, it’s time for deploy script.

And now on you local machine just type: 
  $ cap production deploy

4. Moving data

First create a mysql dump: 
  $ mysqldump --complete-insert --skip-extended-insert   --user=deploy --password="xxxx" app_name > backup.sql

And then rsync all data from old server to the new one.

  $ rsync -az folder/ -e 'ssh -p 987' deploy@domain.com:/opt/applications/app_name/shared/
  $ mysql -u deploy -p app_name < backup.sql

And we are actually done. Now just restart server and application is ready for running.

  $ sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart
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