The Mechanical Turk

When you're trying to marry a server admin interface with a server config that's not about 5 years old (e.g. lighty and rails), you tend to fight the system. That is, the various control panel interfaces do not seem to play nicely with your custom setup out of the box. If you're like me, you tend to end up having your client's files scattered all over the place, config files here and there, rails apps in /var/www/lighttpd, static conetnt in /var/www/httpd/vhosts/client/http_docs, etc, etc.

This should be avoided because; (a) If your client backs up their site using a control panel type interface, they wont get any of the lighty conf or their rails app, (b) In a couple of months, unless you've taken copious notes, which is a pain in itself, you won't have a clue where all the relevant data for a particular client is, and (c) when it comes to upgrading your system, or the client's application, you'll probably miss something.

In this post, and others (linked below), I detail my attempt to create a uniform way of hosting rails apps for our clients, using Plesk. Plesk is real easy to use for keeping track of various admin related things, setting up mail, dns stuff, and has a nice interface for the client. that you can use for website admin. I'd like to make it easy for my and my forgetful brain to add a new app in a month.

System setup

Our server is a Fedora Core 4 machine, and it's real easy to get the system up to speed. A quick google found a real nice howto by Digital Media Minute. If you're starting with Plesk v8, then you'll already have a lot of the software you need. Note: If you're running FC < 4, I'd strongly recommend upgrading.

Setup lighttpd

I'm keeping the same permissions system as plesk for the rails apps. This means that lighttpd must belong to the psaserv group to be able to read your rails project. To achieve this edit /etc/group and change:

psaserv:x:2523:apache,psaftp,psaadm

to:

psaserv:x:2523:lighttpd,apache,psaftp,psaadm

You should set lighttpd to run at startup:

chkconfig --add lighttpd 
chkconfig --level 345 lighttpd on

See my post about lighttpd config for a full-blown vhost and subdomain setup, or see the rails wiki for a simple example.

Configuring a rails site

So here's what I do when setting up a new rails app with plesk:

1. Set up the vhost or subdomain with plesk control panel.

This will create the required directories in /var/www/vhosts/<your domain> or /var/www/vhosts/<your domain>/subdomain/<your subdomain>

2. Set up proxy pass.

We're going to leave Apache running, and just get it to pass requests to and from lighty for our railsified sites. This is pretty easy to do with plesk. Just add the following in /var/www/vhosts/<your domain>/conf/vhost.conf:

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyPass / http://0.0.0.0:81/
ProxyPassReverse / http://0.0.0.0:81/

If you want to also pass SSL to lighty then simply copy vhost.conf to vhost_ssl.conf and add the following line at the end.

RequestHeader set X_FORWARDED_PROTO 'https'

If you're configuring a subdomain then you need to edit the subdomain's conf, no need to touch the vhosts's conf.

Finally, to get plesk to recognise the new vhost.conf file you need to do the following (irrespective of whether it's a domain or subdomain):

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng --reconfigure-vhost --vhost-name=<your domain>

3. Set up a rails directory

Make a rails directory in the client's site (/var/www/vhosts/<your domain>), and make it belong to the psaserv group, and to the user who owns the site. Also set the sticky bit on group. You want the permissions to look like this:

chmod 750 rails
chmod g+s rails
ls -al | grep rails
drwxr-s---   2 client  psaserv 4096 Sep 26 09:15 rails

4. Deploy your rails app

Get your rails app, for example typo, into rails/ by whatever method you normally would. Make sure that lighttpd has write access to public/, log/ and tmp/.

chmod -R g+w tmp public log

5. Configure lighty for your app

Now you need to write the lighty conf for the app. If you're following my post about lighty config then you need to put the following in /var/www/vhosts/<your domain>/conf/lighttpd.conf:

var.rails-root = var.host-root + "/rails/typo"
var.fcgi-min-procs = 1 # or whatever you like
var.fcgi-max-procs = 2 # for these values
include "rails.conf"

Otherwise edit /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf and add something like the following:

  $HTTP["host"] =~ "(^|www\.)domain\.com" {
    
    var.rails-root = "/var/www/vhosts/domain/rails/typo"
    
    server.document-root = var.rails-root + "/public"
    server.errorlog      = var.rails-root + "/log/lighttpd_error.log"
    accesslog.filename   = var.rails-root + "/log/lighttpd_access.log"

    url.rewrite = ( "^/$" => "index.html", "^([^.]+)$" => "$1.html" )

    server.error-handler-404 = "/dispatch.fcgi"

    fastcgi.server = ( ".fcgi" =>
      ( "localhost" =>
        ( "min-procs" => 1,
          "max-procs" => 2,
          "socket" => var.rails-root + "/tmp/sockets/fcgi.socket",
          "bin-path" => var.rails-root + "/public/dispatch.fcgi",
          "bin-environment" => ( "RAILS_ENV" => "production" )
        )
      )
    )
  }

Finally, restart your lighttpd server:

service lighttpd restart