The Sinatra framework has a fairly unmapped deployment landscape.  The standard answer is to use Thin or Mongrel, and have a reverse proxy (lighttpd, or nginx, or even Apache) point to your bundle of servers.

But of course that isn’t always possible.  Cheap shared hosting (like Dreamhost) won’t let you run Thin or Mongrel, or setup reverse proxies (at least on the shared plan).

Luckily Rack supports various connectors, including CGI and FastCGI.  Unluckily for us, FastCGI doesn’t quite work with the current Sinatra git HEAD.

To get a dumb “hello world” Sinatra application up and running on dreamhost involves pulling down the current Sinatra code, and hacking at it a bit.  Don’t worry, it’s mostly just commenting out a few lines, and tweaking another line.

Files needed:

• .htaccess
• dispatch.fcgi
• Tweaked sinatra.rb

RewriteEngine on

AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi
Options +FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'sinatra/lib/sinatra.rb'
require 'rubygems'

fastcgi_log = File.open("fastcgi.log", "a")
STDOUT.reopen fastcgi_log
STDERR.reopen fastcgi_log
STDOUT.sync = true

set :logging, false
set :server, "FastCGI"

module Rack
  class Request
    def path_info
      @env["SCRIPT_URL"].to_s
    end
    def path_info=(s)
      @env["SCRIPT_URL"] = s.to_s
    end
  end
end

load 'test.rb'

  def run
    begin
      #puts "== Sinatra has taken the stage on port #{port} for #{env} with backup by #{server.name}"
      require 'pp'
      server.run(application) do |server|
        trap(:INT) do
          server.stop
          #puts "\n== Sinatra has ended his set (crowd applauds)"
        end
      end
    rescue Errno::EADDRINUSE => e
      #puts "== Someone is already performing on port #{port}!"
    end
  end

Hopefully that helps somebody get up and running, check out #sinatra on freenode.org to ask questions, but be patient, we’re friendly, but work day jobs.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2008 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Programming, Ruby, Sinatra. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.