Getting Ruby on Rails working with Apache

rubyonrails-talk
1

I just bought space on a virtual server that has Ruby and Ruby on Rails installed. I ran the script to install the basic "Hello World" code but it installed the files in /work/demo which is not in my Apache path. I tried to bring up Webbrick which worked but my provider blocks port 3000 so I can't access it.

How do I get basic Ruby on Rails working in my /usr/local/apache/htdocs directory?

thanks

2

You don't need rails in your Apache directory - Apache won't be serving the rails app iteslf. You need to set up proxying inside Apache to proxy requests to port 80 of your virtual server to port 3000 (or whatever) locally. This is done with the ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse directives.

Have a look at the docs here: mod_proxy - Apache HTTP Server Version 2.2

It's actually pretty easy, although that page is a bit daunting. I'm sure google will offer a more concise tutorial...

Ashley

3

Thanks alot for sending me down the right path Ashley. I looked up ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse, do I need both?

Also, should I simply point Apache to the /work/demo directories that I created with the ruby script?

Thanks

john Ashley Moran wrote:

4

Thanks alot for sending me down the right path Ashley. I looked up ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse, do I need both?

Yes, or things like redirect will fail - because Apache needs to rewrite response headers that come out of the rails server that will contain localhost instead of the real hostname of the server. The host config will look something like

   <Proxy *>      Order deny,allow      Allow from all    </Proxy>

   <Location />    # or possibly <Location /my_app>      ProxyPass localhost:3000      ProxyPassReverse localhost:3000    </Location>

Also, should I simply point Apache to the /work/demo directories that I created with the ruby script?

No need unless you want apache to server static content directly. I've never bothered with that because I've never managed anything where it's become an issue. I don't think it's hard to do though. When you are using proxying, the rails app can be on a different physical server - indeed that's the principle behind horizontal scaling, which is achieved in apache using mod_proxy_balancer. But for simple cases you don't need to worry about that. (At work, we've got two apache servers that are load-balanced. Our rails apps run in mongrel on the same servers, and each apache proxies to its own local mongrels only, so our apache configs would be the same as yours despite the extra redundancy)

Ashley