HOWTO Install Rails running on Nginx+Passenger on Opalstack

sean

Opalstack's Ruby on Rails installer creates a Rails project served by Puma. A lot of you coming to us from WebFaction are more familiar with Nginx+Passengers for your Rails project, so here's how you can do a manual install of that. It's easy, I promise!

The following steps use a shell user named "myuser" and an app named "appname" with a port assignment of 54321. The Rails project name is "myproject". Be sure to change those values to match your own items when you perform these steps.

Create a shell user and make a note of the shell username.
Create a "proxy port" application and make a note of its port assignment
Add the app from step 2 to a site.

SSH to your shell user from step 1 and run the following commands:

cd ~/apps/appname
export GEM_HOME=$PWD/env
export PATH=/opt/bin:$PWD/env/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/lib
gem install rails # you can include a version parameter here for an older version
rails new myproject
gem install passenger
passenger-install-nginx-module --auto --languages ruby --prefix=$HOME/apps/appname/nginx 
cp nginx/conf/nginx.conf nginx/conf/nginx.conf.orig

Next, edit ~/apps/appname/nginx/conf/nginx.conf like so (remember to put in your own paths and ports!):

env               GEM_HOME=/home/myuser/apps/appname/env;
env               LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/lib;
worker_processes  1;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    access_log  /home/myuser/logs/apps/appname/access_appname.log  combined;
    error_log   /home/myuser/logs/apps/appname/error_appname.log   crit;

    include         mime.types;
    sendfile        on;

    passenger_root /home/myuser/apps/appname/env/gems/passenger-6.0.6;
    passenger_ruby /usr/bin/ruby;
    passenger_max_instances_per_app  1;
    rails_spawn_method conservative;
    passenger_max_pool_size 2;

    server {
        listen             54321;
        passenger_enabled  on;
        root               /home/myuser/apps/appname/myproject/public;
        server_name        localhost;
	rails_env          development;
    }
}

That's pretty much it! To control the app:

Start: ~/apps/appname/nginx/sbin/nginx
Stop: pkill -f "appname/nginx"

At the moment I only have this working with the installed system Ruby 2.6.5. I'll try to follow up here with an example of doing this with a different version of Ruby (probably with rvm) as soon as possible. (done!)

I'm totally not a Rails guru, but after years of working with WF customers I know that a lot of you are. If any of you are here and have suggestions to improve this, provide alternate config, maybe do the rvm bit for me 😄, then feel free to jump into the conversation. Thanks!

digitalmoksha

sean this looks great. A few initial comments:

I think you want rails new myproject instead of rails start myproject
You might mention that you'll have to specify the prefix directory during the nginx install. You really need to use a full path (not ~). So like /home/myuser/apps/appname/nginx or something

I'll post anything else I run across

tescher

sean One other thing here. If you just create a naked proxy port app, no env directory gets created and you don't have permission to create one either. I got around this by creating a Rails app, then changing the version.

sean

digitalmoksha Thanks!

I've corrected the rails command and I've added the --prefix and --auto options to the passenger-install-nginx-module command. I've used $HOME in the prefix option to avoid the the tilde thing.

christer

If I create the app in step 2 using the dashboard logged in as the original user, the new user can not acces the applications directory with ssh.

sean

christer your dashboard user is completely separate from your shell users.

If you create a shell user and then create an app assigned to that shell user, then the shell user should be able to access the app. If that's not happening then please contact our support email and we'll look into it.

tescher

Success! I had to take some env vars from my previous nginx.conf on WF, and precompile assets, but after that it came up. Woohoo!

This does not seem to stop the nginx instance:

pkill -f appname/nginx

Use instead:

pkill -f nginx

sean

tescher If you're running multiple nginx then pkill -f nginx will kill all of them.

Try wrapping the argument in quotes, ie pkill -f "appname/nginx" and let me know how that goes.

sean

tescher I had to take some env vars from my previous nginx.conf on WF

Which env variables did you need to set?

digitalmoksha

sean nginx also creates a pid file nginx/logs/nginx.pid. I took the start and stop scripts from the original puma installation, and started modifying them.

So in the stop script, I changed the PIDFILE line to read

PIDFILE="/home/myuser/apps/appname/nginx/logs/nginx.pid"

and that works for me so far

tescher

sean no luck. The processes are still there.

tescher

sean Stuff specific to my app, so not relevant to your template

christer

sean Yes, fine. Thanks

sean

tescher If you just create a naked proxy port app, no env directory gets created and you don't have permission to create one either

That seems wrong to me. You can't create an env directory directly under ~/apps but you should definitely be able to create one in ~/apps/appname provided that you are logged in as the shell user who owns that app.

christer

This to works for me - at least for a toy application. But the installation complains that yarn is not installed and looking at the yarn installation this needs to be done with root privileges.

I wonder why it is necessary to create a separate shell user per application. This makes things a little bit more complicated if you want to use git and capistrano for deployment. I haven't tried this yet, but I think you will need to have the shell user be the owner of the git repo, which means you have to have separate gitea accounts (and emails,...) for each shell user. Maybe this could be resolved with a common group for all shell users created by a dashboard user, and set things up so they all have access to all repos managed by a single gitea account.

tescher

christer @sean had sent me this in an email. Maybe it will fix your yarn issue

# adjust myapp and myproject to match yours
cd ~/apps/myapp
export APPDIR=$HOME/apps/myapp
export PROJECTDIR=$APPDIR/myproject
export GEM_HOME=$APPDIR/env
export PATH=$PROJECTDIR/bin:$GEM_HOME/bin:$PATH
mv env env.old
mkdir env
cd env
wget https://yarnpkg.com/latest.tar.gz
tar zxf latest.tar.gz --strip 1
rm latest.tar.gz
cd ..
# replace x.y with your versions
gem install rails -v X.Y

sean

christer I wonder why it is necessary to create a separate shell user per application.

It's not a requirement that you create a separate shell user for each application.

We provide that capability for a couple of reasons:

Convenience - you can use shell users to group apps by project or whatever
Security - at WF, everything ran as a single user. This meant that if (for example) a single Wordpress site picked up some malware via a sketchy plugin, suddenly you had WordPress COVID and all of your WP apps and other PHP apps got infected. At Opalstack that will not not happen if you isolate your unrelated apps under separate shell users.

All of that is there if you need it but it's not mandatory to use it.

christer

tescher Thanks a lot! Following this, I did the wget of the yarn package, gem unistall rails and gem install rails, and it didn't complain. And there is now a yarn in the env/bin directory, so that seems to be good.

tescher

sean I couldn't. I had to have it create a rails app, then go through the downgrade.

christer

sean Thanks for the clarification, and I fully understand the objective. Still, it would be good to be able to put the shell users one has created from the dashboard in the same group to allow a minimum of sharing, at least to copy files between them. A secure way would be to provide a "group-public" directory where a user can copy stuff that can be shared within the group.

sean

christer it would be good to be able to put the shell users one has created from the dashboard in the same group to allow a minimum of sharing, at least to copy files between them.

That aligns nicely with some ideas that we're kicking around for the future, thanks for the input ❤️

sean

tescher Pretty weird! If you're having this problem with one of your apps right now (or if you run into it again) then please ping me via our support email with the app details so that I can see what's going on.