Deploying rails application

Passenger + Apache + ubuntu 20.04

Hey there!

You want to know how can you deploy a rails application on an ubuntu instance. without any small talk, let's get into it

When I had to deploy my first application first thing I was wondering was why do I need to use apache + passenger. Why can't I use the default rails server?

Apache is a web server .another similar option is Nginx. These web servers provide HTTP transaction handling and serve static files. passenger is an application server. these application servers help ruby rails apps to communicate HTTP.which rails apps cannot do by themself. application servers typically aren’t as good as Nginx and Apache at handling HTTP requests. Nginx and Apache are better at handling I/O security, HTTP concurrency management, connection timeouts, etc. That’s why, in production environments, application servers are used in combination with Nginx or Apache.

Image credit to Phusion passenger official documentation

rails built-in ‘ rails server ’ is not an application server, it is a small wrapper that launches your application in an application server. That's why we don't use the rails server in production.

Basically, Passenger integrates with Nginx or Apache and manages the application and its resources.

Now we can move on to the configuration part!

Assumptions

I'm assuming you have already configured your ruby and rails and have a rails application that you want to deploy.

Apache installation

sudo apt update
sudo apt install apache2

Install Passenger

gem install passenger

Prerequisite for apache passenger

Install libcurl for client-side URL transfer

sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev

To install Apache 2 development headers:

apt-get install apache2-dev

To install Apache Portable Runtime (APR) development headers:

apt-get install libapr1-dev

To install Apache Portable Runtime Utility (APU) development headers:

apt-get install libaprutil1-dev

Install the apache passenger module

passenger-install-apache2-module

this will take some time. read carefully what it prompts. if you are missing any prerequisites it will prompt you. install those if any. in the end, it will ask you to add some lines to the apache config file, open a new terminal and add those lines to /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and append those lines. save and exit. restart apache

#add lines to this file
sudo nano  /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
#restart apache 
sudo service apache2 restart

come back to your passenger installation window and hit enter.

you have successfully installed the required dependencies!

time to configure them for application deployment.

Deploying an app to a virtual host’s root

create a new configuration file in the apache2 directory

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/testapp.conf

Determine the Ruby command that Passenger should use

passenger-config about ruby-command

Here is the sample template you can use for the configuration file.

# /etc/apache2/sites-available/testapp.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName yourserver.com

    # Tell Apache and Passenger where your app's 'public' directory is
    DocumentRoot /path-to-your-app/public

    PassengerRuby /path-to-ruby

    # Relax Apache security settings
    <Directory /path-to-your-app/public>
      Allow from all
      Options -MultiViews
      # Uncomment this if you're on Apache > 2.4:
      #Require all granted
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

put your server name or IP address instead of yourserver.com. and replace path-to-your-app with your rails application dir path. put path-to-ruby we found in the previous step.

Make sure the Passenger Apache module; it may be enabled already:

sudo a2enmod passenger

disable the default apache site and enable your site .once done restart Apache:

sudo a2dissite 000-default
sudo a2ensite testapp
sudo service apache2 restart

now you’ll be able to see your rails application up and running on your IP address.

here you go!

Congratulations! you have successfully configured apache+passenger for rails application deployment!

hope you find this helpful. don't forget to connect with me on Twitter.

Thanks for reading! happy coding!

References :

Deploying a Ruby application - Apache - Passenger Library