How to Deploy a Rails App to Apache with Passenger

This guide is for Fedora Core 19, but I think it should be fine for any Linux machines...

Prepare System

1. Create a local account that will be used for passenger config

$ sudo useradd samdc
$ sudo passwd samdc
$ su - samdc

2. Install RVM and Ruby using this post (How to Install RVM, Ruby and Rails), up to step 10.

Install Passenger

3. Start apache

$ sudo apachectl start

4. Install passenger

$ gem install passenger
$ passenger-install-apache2-module

This runs the installer...

Press enter. The installer will check for required software, if the dependencies are not met, it will tell you what to install...

5. Install all missing dependencies and re-run the install

$ sudo yum install httpd-devel
$ sudo yum install apr-devel
$ sudo yum install apr-util-devel
$ passenger-install-apache2-module

A number of sources will be compiled and after that it will ask to update our Apache config...

6. To find out where the Apache config file is, try these commands

$ apachectl -V | grep HTTPD_ROOT
 -D HTTPD_ROOT="/etc/httpd"
$ apachectl -V | grep SERVER_CONFIG_FILE
 -D SERVER_CONFIG_FILE="conf/httpd.conf"

From that, our config file is in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

7. Our Apache config has this at the end.

$ cat /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
...
IncludeOptional conf.d/\*.conf

Which means we can maintain our extensions separately. In our case, what we want to do is to create a file called passenger.conf, then we can add the lines as indicated by the passenger installer from step 5 of this guide.

$ sudo vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/passenger.conf
$ cat /etc/httpd/conf.d/passenger.conf
LoadModule passenger_module /home/samdc/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p353/gems/passenger-4.0.26/buildout/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /home/samdc/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p353/gems/passenger-4.0.26
PassengerDefaultRuby /home/samdc/.rvm/wrappers/ruby-2.0.0-p353/ruby

Configure Apache

8. Create directories that we will use later

$ sudo mkdir /etc/httpd/sites-available
$ sudo mkdir /etc/httpd/sites-enabled

9. Add a virtual host for our rails app

$ sudo vi /etc/httpd/sites-available/depot.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName www.depot.com
   ServerAlias depot.com
   DocumentRoot /home/samdc/prod/depot/public
   <Directory /home/samdc/prod/depot/public>
      AllowOverride all
      Options all 
      Require all granted
   </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

10. Tell Apache about our virtual hosts

$ vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Add this at the bottom:

Include sites-enabled/*.conf

11. Link the virtual host definition to sites-enabled

$ sudo ln -s /etc/httpd/sites-available/depot.conf /etc/httpd/sites-enabled/depot.conf

12. Add ServerName entry to /etc/hosts file

$ vi /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 www.depot.com
127.0.0.1 depot.com

Configure SELinux

13. Suspend SELinux

$ sudo setenforce 0

14. Install checkpolicy

$ sudo yum install checkpolicy

15. Walk through SELinux log and generate new SELinux policy module

$ sudo grep httpd /var/log/audit/audit.log | /usr/bin/audit2allow -M passenger

16. Make policy active

$ sudo semodule -i passenger.pp

17. Switch SELinux back to enforcing mode

$ sudo setenforce 1

18. Restart Apache

$ sudo apachectl restart

Deploy Rails App

19. Copy all files to the deploy directory

$ cp -r /home/samdc/dev/depot/ /home/samdc/prod/

20. Install all gems required

$ cd /home/samdc/prod/depot/

If using a different db in production, e.g., mysql, change the Gemfile to add that for production

$ vi Gemfile

group :production do
  gem 'mysql2'
end

$ bundle install

21. Create the database

$ mysql -u root -p
> CREATE DATABASE depot_production DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;
> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON depot_production.* TO 'username'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
> EXIT;

22. Configure rails production yml file

$ vi config/database.yml

production:
  adapter: mysql2
  encoding: utf8
  reconnect: false 
  database: depot_production
  pool: 5
  username: username
  password: password
  host: localhost

23. Lets load the database

$ rake db:setup RAILS_ENV="production"
$ rake db:seed

24. Change production environment settings

$ vi config/environments/production.rb

config.serve_static_assets = true
config.assets.compile = true

25. Precompile assets

$ rake assets:precompile

26. Now browse to http://depot.com