Moving (again) http://onrails.org from Heroku to EC2
If you read this then this blog is now running Typo 5.5 on Rails 2.3.9 on EC2.
I really love the ease of deployment to heroku and the fact that they manage the whole stack. However I receive regularly emails from Heroku stating that I get a specific number of “backlog too deep errors” indicating the app is receiving more requests than it is capable of responding to, or in other words that that my blog is outgrowing their developer instance. So I have the option to increment the number of requests my application can handle, which is easy thanks to the the heroku command line: heroku dynos +1 —app onrails. So I can increase the HTTP performance by cranking up the “dynos” to 2 which would be an additional $36 a month. I still think it’s a good deal for a managed environment.
However you also saw on my last blog entry that there are other issues with running Typo on Heroku and therefore I started playing with running Rails on EC2. And I like what I see and now that Amazon has an official and secured Amazon Linux AMI, I’ll be using that. Here are a few notes on how I did set it up.
I started with the new Basic 32-bit Amazon Linux AMI 1.0 (http://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/). I take basically only a few clicks to get a server started. You can use the ec2 console (https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2) to create and connect to the server, however you need to use ec2-user instead of root to connect due to the way the Amazon Linux AMI is setup.
Note Lee is right that if I continue to moving host I should create a Chef recipe for this.
Install dev tools
$ sudo yum install git
$ sudo yum install make gcc-c++ zlib-devel openssl-devel
$ sudo yum install ruby-devel ruby-libs ruby-mode ruby-rdoc ruby-irb ruby-ri ruby-docs
Install MySQL
$ sudo yum install mysql mysql-server
$ sudo /etc/init.d/mysqld restart
$ mysql_secure_installation
$ sudo yum install mysql-libs mysql-devel
Install ruby-mysql
$ sudo gem install mysql —no-ri —no-rdoc
Install rubygems
$ wget http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.3.7.zip
$ tar xzvf rubygems-1.3.7.tgz
$ cd rubygems-1.3.7
$ sudo ruby setup.rb
$ cd ..
Install Rails (note I use 2.3.9 for Typo )
$ sudo gem install rails —no-ri —no-rdoc
$ sudo gem install rails —no-ri —no-rdoc -v=2.3.9
Install Apache (2.2.15)
$ sudo yum install httpd
Install Passenger
$ sudo gem install passenger —no-ri —no-rdoc
$ sudo yum install httpd-devel
$ passenger-install-apache2-module
Configure Passenger
nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
Suppose you have a Rails application in /somewhere. Add a virtual host to your
Apache configuration file and set its DocumentRoot to /somewhere/public:
Installing Typo (from source)
see http://wiki.github.com/fdv/typo/install-typo-from-sources
$ wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/71779/typo-5.5.zip
then unzip, that’s it. That’s your typo instance, now let’s configure it’s database.
Note I moved it to /var/www/typo/
Create config/database.yml i.e.
production
adapter: mysql
host: localhost
username: yourusername
password: secret
database: onrails_prod
Change the Rails version in config/environment.rb, replace 2.3.8 with 2.3.9
RAILS_GEM_VERSION = ‘2.3.8’ unless defined? RAILS_GEM_VERSION
setups gems required for Typo:
$ sudo rake gems:install
Creating/Copying database:
Note I migrated my blog so I need to copy the database to the new server.
$ scp -i .ssh/linux_ami.pem onrails_org.sql ec2-user@ec2-184-73-20-188.compute-1.amazonaws.com:onrails_org.sql
$ mysql -u yourusername -p
create database onrails_prod;
exit
$ mysql -u yourusername -p onrails_prod < onrails_org.sql
As I also update Typo to a new version I had to run a migration:
$ rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production
Note if you want a clean install you can just to a rake db:create and rake db:migrate.
Et voila! Well Heroku made it simpler but I always have fun playing with EC2.
Enjoy!
Daniel
Daniel Wanja
HTML5, iOS and Ruby On Rails Nouvelles Solutions, Inc.
d@n-so.com
