Setting up a Rails server

This Chef repository aims at being the easiest way set up and configure your own Rails server to host one or more Ruby on Rails applications using best practices from the community. These recipes do not require a Chef server

The configuration is heavily inspired by blog posts and chef recipes from 37signals and the Opscode Community Cookbooks. It takes care of automatic installation and configuration of the following software on a single server or multiple servers:

• Nginx as webserver
• Unicorn as the Rails application server (with rolling restarts)
• App deployment with Capistrano
• (optional) Haproxy for routing / load balancing to multiple app servers.

The Chef recipes in this repository are meant to set up servers with a bare Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) installation and that you have a user with sudo access and a SSH Server installed.

If you need help

The following steps will let you set up or test your own Rails infrastructure in 5 - 10 minutes. If something doesn't work or you need more instructions:

Please! Open an issue or email [email protected].

Getting started

Server prerequisites

Your server has:

• Ubuntu 12.04 is installed.
• A user called locomotive with sudo rights.

If you did not create the locomotive user during the Ubuntu installation process (for instance if your VPS vendor generates a password for you). Log in to your server as root and do the following:

adduser locomotive
adduser locomotive admin

Installation

Clone the repository onto your own workstation. I am using firmhouse_chef_repo as destination folder as an example.

git clone git://github.com/firmhouse/locomotive-chef-repo.git firmhouse_chef_repo

Install capistrano

gem install capistrano

And initialize submodules:

git submodule init
git submodule update

Setting up the server

In the local checkout of this repository, copy config/servers.rb.sample to config/servers.rb and define your applications and deploy keys in this file.

cp config/servers.rb.sample config/servers.rb

and modify.

Bootstrap your configured server with a standard Chef installation. SSH into your server and run this command:

curl -L https://www.opscode.com/chef/install.sh | sudo bash

Upload the Chef cookbooks and configuration to your server:

cap chef:update

Now it's time to actually install and configure your server:

cap chef:apply

After this command runs successfully, you should be able to browse to the domain name of your server and see a 503 Nginx error message. This is because running the above commands have set up a bare deployment skeleton for your application(s) and it is now time to deploy it using Capistrano. Read about this in the next section.

Deploying your applications

The scripts in Getting started set up a bare deployment structure on your server that you can use with Capistrano. The deployment structure for your apps look like:

/u/apps/your_app
  current/
  releases/
  shared/
    config/
      database.yml
      unicorn.rb
    pids/
    log/
    sockets/

First, capify your application by running the following command in your application:

capify .

Then, copy the examples/deploy.rb file from this repository into config/deploy.rb in your Capified Rails project and modify it so the servers lines point to the server you just set up.

You will want to uncomment the line about assets in the file Capfile in your application. This makes sure compilation of the asset pipeline works. Your Capfile should look like this:

load 'deploy'
# Uncomment if you are using Rails' asset pipeline
load 'deploy/assets'
load 'config/deploy' # remove this line to skip loading any of the default tasks

Finally, you can run one of the folllowing commands to deploy your application:

cap deploy
or
cap deploy:migrations

And you are deployed! Optionally migrations will run if you used the second command.

Resources and original authors

• Most of the cookbooks that are used in this repository are installed from the Opscode Community Cookbooks.
• The rails and bluepill configuration is based off the cookbooks by jsierles at https://github.com/jsierles/chef_cookbooks