Deploying a Sinatra app with Apache and Phusion Passenger a.k.a. mod_rack

My Sinatra + Apache + Passenger setup did not just run :)

Deploying a simple Sinatra rack application under Apache and Phusion Passenger turned out not work out of the box for me.

I already had a virtual host so I decided to deploy with passengers sub URI (sub URI documentation).

To make this work you’ll need Apache installed with Phusion Passenger setup (Passenger installation)

This is what I started with

This is my folders for the already existing website.

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# Existing homedir
/home/my_web/
# Current webroot
/home/my_web/htdocs

Creating folders and files for Sinatra

The first thing you want to do is to create folders and files for Sinatra.

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mkdir /home/my_web/sinatra
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cd /home/my_web/sinatra
mkdir tmp
mkdir logs
mkdir public
touch app.rb
touch config.ru

Create symlink

Create a symbolic link from our current webroot to the new Sinatra app so that apache/passenger can find it.

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ln -s /home/my_web/sinatra/public /home/my_web/htdocs/app

Creating the application

We also need a Sinatra application for this to work so lets fill those files.

File: config.ru

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require 'app'

set :environment, ENV['RACK_ENV'].to_sym
set :app_file,     'app.rb'
disable :run

log = File.new("logs/sinatra.log", "a")
STDOUT.reopen(log)
STDERR.reopen(log)

run Sinatra::Application

File: app.rb

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require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

before do
  # Strip the last / from the path
  request.env['PATH_INFO'].gsub!(/\/$/, '')
end

get '' do
   "Hello world"
end

Apache configuration

Now we need to setup apache so that it can find our Sinatra app and load it.

The only thing you need to do is add the following line to your existing VirtualHost block:

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RackBaseURI /app

This line will tell passenger to look into our existing webroot for a symlink thats named app and which points to our rack app. (RackBaseURI documentation)

Virtual host entry

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<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName www.example.com
  ServerAlias example.com
  DocumentRoot /home/my_web/htdocs/
  RackBaseURI /app

  <Directory "/home/my_web/htdocs/">
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    AllowOverride All
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

The best part is that you are allowed to specify this option multiple times. So you can easily setup multiple apps under the same virtual host.

Cheers!

Posted in Hosting, Programming, Sinatra at November 30th, 2009. 3 Comments
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The mission where to move their wordpress weblog to the same server as the website.

The easiest way had been to add another IP and install apache behind it. They did not like this solution because they thought they where about to loose google page-rank if the blog and the website where on different ip’s. ok, Fair enough.

The simple solution became to install apache and just proxy the request thought nginx.

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