I don’t like deployment via FastCGI that much. It’s just too unstable, and random for my tastes. So when I saw that Passenger was going to support Rack, I knew I had to get that working on Dreamhost.

Once I started going at it, it only took me a few minutes to make everything work. You can find documentation at the Passenger Github repository.

Steps:

1. Setup your account to support mod_rails
2. Create the directory structure
3. Make a rackup file (config.ru)
4. Create a very simple Sinatra application

1) Setting up the account

• Domains -> Manage Domains -> Edit (web hosting column)
• Enable “Ruby on Rails Passenger (mod_rails)”
• Add the public directory to the web directory box. So if you were using “gittr.com”, it would change to “gittr.com/public”
• Save your changes

2) Creating the directory structure

domain.com/
domain.com/tmp
domain.com/public
# a vendored version of sinatra - not necessary if you use the gem
domain.com/sinatra

3) Creating a rackup file

# This file goes in domain.com/config.ru
require 'sinatra/lib/sinatra.rb'
require 'rubygems'
 
Sinatra::Application.default_options.merge!(
  :run => false,
  :env => :production
)
 
require 'test.rb'
run Sinatra.application

4) A very simple Sinatra application

# this is test.rb referred to above
get '/' do
        "Worked on dreamhost"
end
 
get '/foo/:bar' do
        "You asked for foo/#{params[:bar]}"
end

And that’s all there is to it! Once it’s all setup, point your browser at your domain, and you should see a “Worked on Dreamhost” page. To restart the application after making changes, you need to run “touch tmp/restart.txt”.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Programming, Ruby, Sinatra, System Admin. 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.