The Workshop

There are certain products which are currently shaking the Ruby / Rails community:

• One of them is the infamous Phusion Passenger which makes deploying Rails applications a piece of a cake using Apache web servers,
• And Ruby Enterprise Edition (aka REE) which promises better memory management and better scaleability of your Rails applications.

These are really promising projects and Passenger offers a really elegant and automated setup which makes it pretty easy to be installed. However, I still keep seeing people having problems using it with REE and Rails version 2.2.2 on blogs, RailsForum and mostly on IRC.

In this article I will describe how to set up all of them. Hopefully it will help you understand the basic ideology how a Ruby environment is set up.

You will learn how to install and set up the following products for Rails development/deployment:

• Apache 2.2
• Ruby Enterprise Edition
• RubyGems 1.3.1
• Ruby on Rails 2.2.2
• Passenger 2.1.0 (note: this is an edge version, not recommended in production environment, you can still use 2.0.4)

What you will need:

• Apache web server already set up,
• Root privileges to be able to compile and set up your server
• A basic understanding how to use the Terminal.

OK, let’s get started.

Install Ruby Enterprise Edition

Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE) is a branch of the official Ruby interpreter which is capable of reducing your Rails applications’ memory usage by 33% on average, as well as improving your applications’ performance. First, you will need to install Ruby Enterprise Edition, you can grab the source files from here.

Now open up the Terminal and navigate to your preferred directory where you store your source files. I’ve got a directory at /usr/local/src. I like keeping my stuff tidy.

Let’s unpack this package, navigate to the source and execute the installer:

$ tar xzvf ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810.tar.gz
$ ./ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/installer

The installer will check for dependencies and ask where you want to compile REE to. Pretty straight forward and automated task. Using the default path is not required but recommended. It’s more likely to be installed to /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810 as the default.

Setup Ruby Enterprise Edition in your PATH

It will also install RubyGems (the package manager for Ruby) and the most recent Rails version for you. Straight out of the box. However, you will more likely to have stuff to be fixed.

Now you have Ruby Enterprise Edition installed, let’s take a look at your binaries:

$ which ruby
$ which gem

These commands more likely to return the pre-installed Ruby binaries if you have them, OS X Leopard comes with pre-installed Ruby and related binaries.

If you want to use REE as the primary ruby distribution you can set it up in based on your PATH. I’ve created removed the default binaries and created symbolic links to the new binaries.

Note: Removing is OPTIONAL ONLY but it makes sense if you don’t want to mess up your Ruby distribution. Messing up multiple Ruby and Gem instances is a common mistake what people do pretty often.

$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/ruby
$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/ruby18
$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/gem
$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/rake
$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/rails
$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/rails

Now create the symlinks:

$ sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/bin/ruby /usr/local/bin/
$ sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/bin/gem /usr/local/bin/
$ sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/bin/rake /usr/local/bin/
$ sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/bin/rails /usr/local/bin/

Now if you check your binaries you should have Ruby Enterprise Edition as the primary package:

$ which ruby
/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/bin/ruby
$ which gem
/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/bin/gem

Fix and update RubyGems

OK, now you are ready to go. Ruby Enterprise Edition comes with pre-installed gems. Let’s take a look at it:

$ gem list

You will probably see Rails 2.2.2 (or the most recent version) installed as well. You may think you are ready, but actually we still have to fix something:

Rails version 2.2.2 requires RubyGems 1.3.1 – or newer – to be installed. Rails was installed using RubyGems 1.2.0. You can check it yourself:

$ gem -v
1.2.0

I had problems when the RubyGems update was installed after Rails. Don’t worry, we are just about to fix this. Let’s uninstall Rails and its dependencies without a single sign of fear:

$ sudo gem uninstall rails
$ sudo gem uninstall activerecord
$ sudo gem uninstall actionpack
$ sudo gem uninstall activeresource
$ sudo gem uninstall activesupport
$ sudo gem uninstall acionmailer

Now install the RubyGems update:

$ sudo gem install rubygems-update
$ sudo update_rubygems

This will basically update your RubyGems package manager to the most recent version.

NOTE: If the command “update_rubygems” cannot be found in your PATH then go to your gems folder and execute it right there:

$ cd /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rubygems-update-1.3.1/bin/
$ ./update_rubygems

If you still haven’t succeeded then you can install it explicitly with Ruby:

$ cd /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rubygems-update-1.3.1/
$ ruby setup.rb

Fine, now you should be definitely on version 1.3.1 at least:

$ gem -v
1.3.1

Now let’s install Rails again:

$ sudo gem install rails

Install and set up Passenger with Apache

So you already have Ruby Enterprise Edition with working RubyGems packages such as the most recent Rails version. Now let’s roll on.

There are 2 ways of installing passenger:

• Install the latest official gem release,
• Or you can compile the most recent beta version from source.

REMEMBER: If you are installing these applications on a production server, I’d recommend using the latest official release. As always, you can install Passenger through RubyGems:

$ gem install passenger

Now let’s compile the the Apache module and set up Apache:

$ passenger-install-apache2-module

Just follow the instructions, the installer will locate your web server, compile the module for it and give you some help how to set it up with it. At the end of the installer you will see these 3 lines similar to these:

LoadModule passenger_module /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.1.0/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.1.0
PassengerRuby /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/bin/ruby

Just copy and paste these lines into httpd.conf, and check your configuration and restart Apache:

$ sudo apachectl configtest
Syntax OK
$sudo apachectl restart

Passenger is a great piece of software and it’s pretty easy to be installed as you’ve seen. If you like it, please feel free to donate to Phusion ad get an Enterprise License.

If you are having problems using it, don’t hesitate and post a comment down here, maybe at RailsForum or check out the most common affiliates at the support page.