Creating and Running a Ruby On Rails application in cPanel – Crucial Paradigm

A number of clients have approached us asking how to get their Ruby on Rails application running on cPanel, so we wrote a tutorial to help alleviate some of doubt:

1. Login to cPanel.
2. Click on the icon for “Ruby on Rails”.
3. Check the box for “Load on boot?”
4. Fill in the “App Name” box with the application name”.
5. Application Path will be automatically filled as public_html/application_name
6. Select “production” for the Environment, which should already be selected as the default.
7. Click “Create”

After starting the application, you can access it using the URL : http://domainname/app_name/public/
Avoid : http://domainname/app_name/public

Each application will be using a port above 12000(>12000). The application will be automatically assigned a port when we are creating the application from cpanel.

Note : If we are creating the application under public_html directory, the application’s source code and configuration files can be viewed by anyone on the web. So, to avoid this you have two options:

• Create the application in the public_html directory and change config file permission to 600. Especially the database.yml (/home/username/public_html/application_name/config/database.yml) file in which all the mysql access details are specified.

• Create the application in home directory and use the rewrite option.

You can create the application in the home directory (/home/username) and then use the rewrite option in cpanel(Cpanel >> Ruby On Rails >> Create A Rewrite). On the right hand side of each application, click the link “Create Rewrite” and save the required rewrite rule. For example: if you want to redirect the main domain to your rails application port, say http://domainname:12002, Select the main domain in “Domain & URL to be redirected to rails app” section and click save. Similarly, you can redirect a subdomain to the rails application by selecting the corresponding subdomains from the list(Domain & URL to be redirected to rails app). But before that you should create that particular subdomain in cPanel.

Each user can run 4 rails applications at a time.

Simple test application :
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• Create the application from cpanel, for exampe: Application name : example
• Generate the test controller, via SSH:

#cd /home/username/public_html/example/
#ruby script/generate controller home

• Create corresponding directory to store views, via SSH:

#cd /home/username/public_html/example/appl/views/
# mkdir home
# vi index.rhtml
<h1>Welcome</h1>
And save index.rhtml file.
#cd ..
#chown -R username:username home

• Start the application

• You can access the application from http://domainname:port/home/

When you access the URL http://domainname:port, the default ruby welcome page will be displayed. If you want to see the application on the main page, set the corresponding route in the configuration file routes.rb.

For example: In the above test application example, to display the welcome page of our home controller, instead of rails welcome page, uncomment and change the following line in routes.rb (home/username/public_html/example/config/routes.rb).
map.root :controller => “welcome”
==> map.root :controller => “home”

Move the default rails welcome index file “/home/username/public_html/example/public/index.html” to another name(index.html.bak) or you can remove the file.

• Now you can access the home page from http://domainname:port

Creating a simple database application :
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• Create the application from cPanel, application name, eg: testdata.
• Create the database. Use db migration to create the database. Create a database user with privileges and assign this user to the database in cPanel.
• Edit /home/username/public_html/testdata/config/database.yml

production:
adapter: mysql
database: username_databasename
username: username_databaseusername
password: *******
host: localhost

• Use scaffolding to generate the controller, models and views.

#ruby script/generate scaffold Test

Rails strongly recommends the following:

• Use ‘id’ as your primary key in a table.
• Name of the model should be the singularization of the name of the database table.

• Use rake db:migrate to migrate the database.
• Start the application from cpanel. You can access the application from http://domainname:port/tests/
• The scaffold generater by default will create some views and controllers. The scaffolded actions and views are: index, list, show, new, create, edit, update, destroy. You can see these simple views in http://domainname:port/tests/. This scaffolding offers skeleton code frameworks from which we can generate the application.

Rails Environments :

• Test : For testing, where we can use sample data.
• Development : For development which will use most of the time when we develop the application. In this environment your application’s code is reloaded on every request.
• Production : Production for the “real deal”, or when the site goes live.

Mongrel :

Cpanel uses Mongrel webserver for rails applications.

Starting mongrel :

• Cpanel >> Ruby On Rails >> application name >> Click “Run”. Or from command line,

# cd <path to application>
#mongrel_rails start -p 12004 -d -e production -P log/mongrel.pid
p –> port
d –> daemon
e –> environment
P –> path to mongrel pid file (default path: /home/username/public_html/application/log/mongrel.pid)

NOTE: Thanks to Anusha for this great article! 

Tags: cpanel, ruby-on-rails

Filed under: Uncategorized by — aaron @ 6:28 pm