fluidBlog

I had read some good things here and here about the deprec gem, so I thought I’d look into using it set up a new slice at Slicehost. deprec was written with Ubuntu as the target distribution. Mike Bailey, the creator of deprec, is very clear about that, so I expected some problems making it work for Fedora. I followed the instructions on the slicehost wiki.

variorum

Lets go straight to the end of the story in the same spirit of the slicehost wiki. The command 'cap installrailsstack’ will not work on Fedora because it relies on 'apt-get'. So we’ll be writing our own shell script to 'yum install' what we need. Another change we’ll need to make is in the file deprec-1.3.1/lib/deprec/thirdparty/mongrelcluster/recipes.rb. Here we need to replace 'update-rc.d' with 'chkconfig'. See the comments in the script to perform this step manually, the script doesn’t touch the deprec gem. Finally, because deprec installs apache from source into '/usr/local/apache2' and we are going to 'yum install httpd', we’ll need to set up some directories that 'cap deprec_setup' is expecting. Additionally, we’ll be setting up mysql to start at boot, and setting the ServerName to hostname in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. You still need to setup the initial database accounts and turn off root login via ssh. See the comments for the commands.

The wiki can be successfully followed after running the installrailsfc6.sh (download) by just skipping the command 'cap installrailsstack’. The comments at the top of the script walk you through the steps, so I’m not going to walk through it here. If the comments in the script are too arcane, please let me know.

You’ll note that the script must be executed as root because sudo is not available on a new FC6 slice. You may prefer to install sudo and execute the remaining commands using sudo. Please don’t download and execute the script without thoroughly confirming that it will do what you want. The script is intended to be run on a newly built slice, so don’t run it if you have already started configuring your system, I haven’t tested that scenario. I don’t recommend executing the script remotely via ssh because some of the gem install’s are interactive, and at least for me didn’t wait for input when executed remotely. I’m not the only one to comment on this feature . Move the script to your slice using ssh, see the comments in the script for the command.

Warning: Opinion Follows

My personal opinion is that setting up the Rails stack is best handled by using the shell and package manager for your distribution. This script has not improved upon the weaknesses present in deprec. Namely, hard coded versions, URLs, paths, etc. Therefore, I don’t recommend that you execute this script without reviewing it carefully precisely because it is likely to fail in the future when versions and URLs change. This is the beauty of using a package manager, all those details are handled for you. Unfortunately, not everything we need for a Rails stack can be yum installed. This script is quick and dirty and passes only the “Works on my Machine” test, where “my machine” is a Slicehost FC6 slice circa March 2007. Although I have tested the script many times, it is, nevertheless, a first pass at documenting the process (executable documentation tends to be more repeatable). OK, you’ve been warned.

Update 4 April

I retested the script today and sure enough, it was broken. For some reason, it no longer copies the init script mongrel_cluster to /etc/init.d. You’ll see these errors when the script tries to setup mongrel to start after a reboot.

error reading information on service mongrel_cluster: No such file or directory

error reading information on service mongrel_cluster: No such file or directory We need to copy

/usr/lib64/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrelcluster-0.2.1/resources/mongrelcluster

to /etc/init.d/ and change permission to make it executable.

chmod 755

I’ve updated the script. IMHO, the gem package for Mongrel needs to work with the version option. The quick fix just adds to the problem by hardcoding another version …