I’ve previously written about deploying Sinatra to Dreamhost, both with FastCGI, and also Passenger (mod_rails). This howto will cover how to deploy Sinatra to a load-balanced reverse-proxy setup using Lighttpd and Thin.

1) Install Lighttpd and Thin

# Figure out lighttpd yourself, it should be handled by your 
# linux distro's package manager
 
# For thin:
gem install thin

2) Create your rackup file - the “require ‘app’” line should require the actual sinatra app you have written.

require 'sinatra'
 
Sinatra::Application.default_options.merge!(
  :run => false,
  :env => :production
)
 
require 'app'
run Sinatra.application

3) Setup a config.yml - change the /path/to/my/app path to reflect reality.

---
    environment: production
    chdir: /path/to/my/app
    address: 127.0.0.1
    user: root
    group: root
    port: 4567
    pid: /path/to/my/app/thin.pid
    rackup: /path/to/my/app/config.ru
    log: /path/to/my/app/thin.log
    max_conns: 1024
    timeout: 30
    max_persistent_conns: 512
    daemonize: true

4) Setup lighttpd.conf - change mydomain to reflect reality. Also make sure the first port here matches up with the port setting in config.yml.

$HTTP["host"] =~ "(www\.)?mydomain\.com"  {
        proxy.balance = "fair"
        proxy.server =  ("/" =>
                                (
                                        ( "host" => "127.0.0.1", "port" => 4567 ),
                                        ( "host" => "127.0.0.1", "port" => 4568 )
                                )
                        )
}

5) Start thin and your application . I have a rake script so I can just call “rake start” rather than typing this in. It’s just a few lines to do that.

thin -s 2 -C config.yml -R config.ru start

Go to mydomain.com/ and see the result! Everything should be setup now, check it out at the domain you setup in your lighttpd.conf file.

Variations - nginx - I haven’t looked into the config file syntax, but there isn’t any reason that this exact same approach wouldn’t work with nginx. Thin and the rackup file stay the same, while the nginx layer has to be configured to reverse proxy to the thin install.

Variations - More Thin instances - To add more thin instances, change the -s 2 parameter on the thin start command to be how ever many servers you want. Then be sure lighttpd proxies to all of them by adding more lines to the proxy statements. Then restart lighttpd and you’re done.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Linux, 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.