Setting up fresh Ubuntu server for Ruby on Rails

Once in a while you, as a Ruby developer, are faced with product owner’s “Alright, now it’s time to make it live”. And then you probably think “I’ll be fighting with these stubborn servers for next few days…”. If you have very simple app or one at the early stages of its lifetime you can use one of “no hassle deployment” platforms like Heroku or OpenShift. But chances are you need some custom stuff that is hard to achieve on these kind of platforms or you just feel better with “root” access.

You have many options for setting up Linux servers. Amongst the most popular ones are Chef and Puppet. Various hosting provider also add their own solutions for provisioning boxes (like Stackscripts on Linode). Or you can do it “the old-school way”, manually. If you don’t need multiple machines and/or you have just a simple Rails site then provisioning tools might be an overkill. Also I believe any Ruby developer should configure production server from scratch at least once to get familiar with this stuff and to learn where to look when troubleshooting server side problems.

Recently I led a workshop about these things here at LLP and we decided to compile this knowledge into a blog post to share it with other Ruby devs and to have a known reference point in the future. So here it goes.

Note: following steps were tested on Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10. They don’t include any version-specific commands so they should also work without a problem on newer Ubuntu versions when they get relased.

Preparations

Let’s assume you just created a VPS box and got email with root access. Now, login to the server. If you got access to non-root user with sudo access then switch to root with:

Set preferred editor

You’ll be configuring the machine by editing several config files. Make sure you have your preferred editor set:

Let’s make it a default editor for future sessions also:

Update apt sources and upgrade base packages

You’ll be installing packages from Ubuntu repositories. Make sure apt sources are up to date:

Now run following to install Vim editor (skip it if you prefer to use nano or
other):

Set server timezone and time

To save yourself (and your app) some trouble set server’s timezone to UTC:

Let’s also install ntp daemon that will keep server time up to date, all the time:

Add user for your app

You don’t want your app to run as root. Let’s assume your app is named “luna” so let’s add “luna” user:

Allow sudo

You’ll be logging into the server as the “luna” user from time to time to do some tweaks. Grant the user sudo access:

Copy SSH key

To avoid typing password (for many reasons) when logging in as “luna” copy your public SSH key to server user’s ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file with following command:

Try ssh’ing now:

You shouldn’t be asked for password anymore.

Useful stuff

Switch to the “luna” user:

Disable installation of rdoc and ri docs for installed gems to save yourself some time:

Set RAILS_ENV to production so you don’t have to type it when invoking rake:

Ruby

Now, for ruby, we’ll install and use RVM to install ruby 1.9.3.
Switch back to root and follow next steps.

Install RVM

Here we’ll install RVM globally (so called “system install” as opposed to “user install”).
This is handy if you want to have several apps or users on the servers.

Make sure you have curl command installed:

Install stable RVM version by piping installation script to bash:

Source rvm script so we don’t need to re-login:

Let’s ignore RVM prompts about trusting .rvmrc files (we’ll use default gemset
for Passenger anyway)

RVM access for user “luna”

Add user luna to rvm group:

Install requirements

See what are requirements for compiling MRI:

Most likely it is the following list of packages:

Install Ruby

Now, install ruby via RVM:

Make installed ruby a default

Make it a default for all new shells:

Nginx + Passenger

As a webserver is concerned, the combo of Nginx + Passenger works well in most cases.

Install passenger gem

Install Nginx via passenger gem

First install dependencies for Nginx/Passenger:

Now compile it:

Just follow the instructions toward to compile and install nginx.

Create boot service (upstart)

Upstart script for Nginx will be used for starting/stopping nginx from command line and will make sure nginx starts on system boot.

Download the script:

Start nginx:

And check if it works by looking at a response:

“Welcome to Nginx” means that all is fine.

VHost

Now we need to create Virtual Host config for the luna app, replacing default
server block with following:

Restart Nginx:

And confirm that it restarted properly:

You should get the 404 page due to the fact that our app is not running yet.

MySQL

Install MySQL server via apt:

Create project database (you will be asked for mysql root password you set when running previous installation command):

And grant access to luna user:

Capistrano

Let’s use Capistrano for deploying new relases of the “luna” app.

Note: All of the commands in this section are meant to be run on your local machine inside the Rails project directory (unless otherwise stated).

Add capistrano to the bundle

First add following to your app’s Gemfile:

The last one nicely integrates capistrano with RVM.

Install new gems:

Generate skeleton capistrano config files

You should have Capfile and config/deploy.rb files now.

Edit Capfile

Make the file contents look like this:

load ‘deploy/assets’ handles assets compilation in Rails 3. If you’re deploying Rails 2 application just remove this line.

Edit config/deploy.rb

First, you should fill the variables with your application name, repository and web server name. Then find commented out block of code that’s related to Passenger. Just uncomment it.

Then make sure you have following lines in the file:

Let capistrano prepare directory structure on the server

Copy example database config file to the server:

First create a config directory inside the shared directory:

Copy the file:

Now set proper values in database.yml on the server:

And deploy for the first time:

Once you have application code on the server log in there and prepare db structure:

Final deploy just to make sure everything works:

Logrotate

Create /etc/logrotate.d/luna file with following content:

That will tell logrotate to rotate log files daily, compress them, keep last 30 days and don’t choke when file is missing. copytruncate is important here as it will make sure log file currently used by Rails app is not moved but truncated. That way the app can just keep on logging without reopening log file.

Don’t forget about this one if you manage production box yourself. And do it when you initially setup the box, not “later”. “Later” often means “when app is down due to not enough disk space”. Srsly.

Firewall

Ubuntu comes with a decent firewall management tool called ufw. Install it:

Now set default firewall policy to “deny”:

And allow connections to the services we want to expose to the world:

Finally, enable firewall:

You’re production environment is safer now.

Mail server (MTA)

There are many offerings for SMTP service that also bring some additional features like email opening tracking, link click tracking and whatnot. If you just need the plain ”send message and forget” functionality you may use Postfix MTA.

Install it by:

Thanks to firewall rules from previous section you don’t need to worry about spammers using your server for sending their spam. They won’t be able to connect to your Postfix daemon from the outside of the machine.

Monitoring

For basic system monitoring the easiest thing you can do is to install monit:

Open /etc/monit/monitrc in an editor and adjust default config to suit your needs.
By default it monitors CPU usage, memory usage, disk usage and several other system-level components.

If you’ve been using god for monitoring your app processes then you may consider using monit also for this task as it’s a much simpler tool for the job.

That’s it!

Great, you have now fully configured Ubuntu server ready to serve your awesome Ruby on Rails application. I hope this tutorial made you realize that this task is not as hard as you thought. Now, after you went through all of this manually try building a set of Chef cookbooks that accomplish above tasks automatically (and repeatably) for you.