Installing Rails on Dreamhost

July 15th, 2007

This tutorial will explain the process of installing a Ruby On Rails app on a dreamhost server (using FastCGI).

There are few “rails on dreamhost” guides out there, and i’m sure there are lots of you ‘dreamhosters’ that wants to install a working rails app.

The un-official documentation written on this is undoubtedly the dreamhost wiki. http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Ruby_on_Rails

You can use this guide, and it might work, it changes often, but in all my cases, it wouldn’t work correctly, and i would end up with numerous 500 errors.

why would you use my guide instead of the dh wiki guide? because if the dh wiki guide doesn’t work for you, you have no one to ask for help work through your issue, conversely, if my guide doesn’t work, you can b!tch and moan to me and i’ll help you get your rails app up and update this guide if need be. and i have screenshots wink

note: Dreamhost is NOT the greatest rails hosting company, but they are my favorite web hosting company hands down… their customer support is finer than the competition by far, so it’s worth it to me to be loyal to dh.

So here is a quick setup guide that works for me, and i’ve followed this process to setup many (FastCGI) rails sites already… never a flaw so far. and sure, it might not be the “most secure way to set it up” but honestly, i haven’t had a problem with that, so it’s not even an issue at this point.

this assume that your web root is empty and ready to serve files, and if it’s not empty, that you backed up all your files to start clean and fresh.

remember to replace “raboof” with your own application name

SSH into your box to install a rails app

make sure you have a ssh user setup in dreamhost
ssh user on dreamhost screenshot

if you are on win*, you might need to download Putty ssh client
putty screenshot

if you are on nix, you probably already have a ssh client, just open a terminal and type *ssh -l username yourwebsite.com
linux ssh login

$cd raboof.com $rails raboof

Setup your app to use FastCGI rails on dreamhost

$cd raboof/public $nano -w .htaccess

find the line that says

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.cgi [QSA,L]

and change it to read

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]

your whole .htaccess file should look like this.

AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi AddHandler cgi-script .cgi Options +FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^$ index.html [QSA] RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L] ErrorDocument 500 "<h2>Application error</h2>Rails application failed to start properly" DirectorySlash Off

now save and exit nano, ctrl+x , y (to save changes), [enter] (to confirm the filename and exit nano)

first open up dispatch.fcgi for editing with nano (-w is so your lines don’t wrap)

$nano -w dispatch.fcgi

make sure you are pointing to the correct ruby binary
the first line should read

#!/usr/bin/ruby

your entire dispatch.fcgi looks like this

#!/usr/bin/ruby require File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../config/environment" require 'fcgi_handler' class RailsFCGIHandler private def frao_handler(signal) dispatcher_log :info, "asked to terminate immediately" dispatcher_log :info, "frao handler working its magic!" restart_handler(signal) end alias_method :exit_now_handler, :frao_handler end RailsFCGIHandler.process!

now save and exit nano

#!/usr/bin/ruby require File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../config/environment" unless defined?(RAILS_ROOT) require "dispatcher" ADDITIONAL_LOAD_PATHS.reverse.each { |dir| $:.unshift(dir) if File.directory?(dir) } if defined?(Apache::RubyRun) Dispatcher.dispatch

if you forgot how to use nano already…

$nano -w dispatch.rb

now save and exit nano

$chmod 755 *

Setting up your dreamhost site

Fin

exit your ssh session by typing ‘exit’

that’s it, now enjoy ruby secksyness powered by dreamhost… comments and suggestions to improve this guide are welcome. gl hf.

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