Tejus's Programming and startup blog

Ruby-Enterprise Edition, Fusion Passenger, and Nginx on Ubuntu Jaunty

I’ve got a 512MB Slicehost instance that I needed to launch a new Rails app (details coming soon). Since 512MB isn’t a whole lot of memory anymore, I wanted to optimize the services on this machine as much as possible. The most efficient setup appeared to be running nginx, Passenger-Nginx, and Ruby Enterprise Edition. It was actually pretty easy to get all this running and would have been even easier had I followed the correct order of operations. Nginx doesn’t support dynamically compiled runtime modules. Everything has to be built-in at compile time. Because of this, running:

$ sudo aptitude install nginx

will get you nothing useable besides the init script. Instead, the best approach is:

1. Install Ruby Enterprise Edition
2. Install nginx-passenger
3. Adjust paths
4. Modify the /etc/init.d/nginx script
5. Reinstall all gems for REE
6. Tweak the nginx config
7. Add nginxensite and nginxdissite scripts to make it more ubuntu-y

The first two steps are pretty self-explanatory and start with the directions found here. Of course, if you are installing nginx, you want to the following instead of the command for apache:

$ /opt/ruby-enterprise/bin/passenger-install-nginx-module

Next you want to tweak the ubuntu /etc/init.d/nginx script to reflect the new paths. You need to change the two lines that read:

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
DAEMON=/usr/sbin/nginx

to

PATH=/opt/nginx/sbin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
DAEMON=/opt/nginx/sbin/nginx

Next, you need to add the Ruby Enterprise Edition interpreter to your path. Open /etc/login.defs and update the paths settings with the location of Ruby Enterprise. Installing gems is pretty straight forward. There are a few small tweaks to make to the nginx config file so that it works more like the ubuntu package. At the top of nginx.conf add/change these settings:

user www-data;
worker_processes  4;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;

In the http section, add:

    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;

Finally, it’s time to create the nginxensite and nginxdissite scripts:

#!/bin/bash

# nginxensite

if [ -z $1 ]; then
        echo 
        echo "You must specify a site name"
        exit 0
fi

NGINX_CONF=/etc/nginx
CONF_FILE="$1"
AVAILABLE_PATH="$NGINX_CONF/sites-available/$CONF_FILE"
ENABLED_PATH="$NGINX_CONF/sites-enabled/$CONF_FILE"

echo 
if [ -e $AVAILABLE_PATH ]; then
        ln -s $AVAILABLE_PATH $ENABLED_PATH

        echo "$1 has been enabled"
        echo "run /etc/init.d/nginx reload to apply the changes"        
else
        echo "$AVAILABLE_PATH does not exist"
        exit 1
fi

and

#!/bin/bash

# nginxdissite

if [ -z $1 ]; then
        echo 
        echo "You must specify a site name"
        exit 0
fi

NGINX_CONF=/etc/nginx
CONF_FILE="$1"
AVAILABLE_PATH="$NGINX_CONF/sites-available/$CONF_FILE"
ENABLED_PATH="$NGINX_CONF/sites-enabled/$CONF_FILE"

echo 
if [ -e $ENABLED_PATH ]; then
        rm $ENABLED_PATH

        echo "$1 has been disabled"
        echo "run /etc/init.d/nginx reload to apply the changes"        
else
        echo "$ENABLED_PATH does not exist, ignoring"
fi

There you go, a working nginx install for your rails apps in less than an hour.