After a long week of tinkering and testing I have finally made the “early access” sign ups for Type Aloud available to the public. Most of this week has been spent fixing some issues with the Ruby Bundler, Nginx and of course Passenger 3. Up until this point I did not make the Type Aloud code available for testing on production and have done most of my development locally. This posed some issues for testing OAuth2 authentication with Facebook, Twitter and other end points, but generally I assumed that it would work as expected. I was ever so slightly wrong.
Passenger itself was quite easy to install. I downloaded it from the website and merely followed the instructions, which downloads nginx and compiles the Passenger module into the nginx executable. This is due to Nginx not supporting loadable modules like Apache, but on my meager Slice Host server this went pretty quick. Within an hour I had a Passenger and Nginx installation up and running. My configuration is a little different than most people: on this particular slice I am running two Rails Rack applications (typealoud.com and thunkbrightly.com) and this WordPress blog which is using the php-fastcgi plugin through Nginx.
The last thing that I did was download Ruby Enterprise Edition which is by the same great cats over at Phusion. This version of Ruby is designed specially to minimize the memory footprint and speed up (as much as possible) the execution. There are some nifty graphs over there on the website so I am not going to gush over any of their stats. The point being: since I am broke and using shared hosting this is the absolute best. The installation went quick and easy.
I install all of my third-party applications into the mounted /opt (optional) directory. This is where Passenger is installed. When it comes to Ruby I decided to install this into the /usr/local because I have several scripts that I wrote which expects this to be in the $PATH environment variable. Because the hardest part of this process was figuring out to correctly configure Passenger 3 for Nginx I am going to post my configuration for my Rails (and php-fastcgi) applications. I hope that this helps some of you.
user op;
worker_processes 2;
error_log logs/error.log warn;
#error_log logs/error.log notice;
#error_log logs/error.log info;
pid logs/nginx.pid;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
passenger_root /opt/passenger-3.0.0;
passenger_ruby /usr/local/bin/ruby;
passenger_max_pool_size 10;
include mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
'$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
'"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';
access_log logs/access.log main;
sendfile on;
#tcp_nopush on;
#keepalive_timeout 0;
keepalive_timeout 65;
gzip on;
gzip_http_version 1.0;
gzip_vary on;
gzip_comp_level 6;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
server {
listen 80;
server_name localhost;
#charset koi8-r;
access_log logs/host.access.log main;
location / {
root html;
index index.html index.htm;
}
}
}sites-available/typealoud.com
server {
listen 80;
server_name www.typealoud.com;
rewrite ^/(.*) http://typealoud.com/$1 permanent;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name typealoud.com;
access_log /var/log/nginx/typealoud.com/access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/typealoud.com/error.log warn;
location / {
root /var/www/typealoud.com/public;
passenger_enabled on;
rack_env production;
rails_spawn_method smart;
index index.htm index.html;
}
}sites-available/thoughtlessbanter.com
server {
listen 80;
server_name www.thoughtlessbanter.com;
rewrite ^/(.*) http://thoughtlessbanter.com/$1 permanent;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name thoughtlessbanter.com;
access_log /var/log/nginx/thoughtlessbanter.com/access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/thoughtlessbanter.com/error.log warn;
location / {
root /var/www/thoughtlessbanter.com;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
if (-f $request_filename) {
expires 30d;
break;
}
if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
}
}
location ~ \.php {
include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
keepalive_timeout 30;
proxy_read_timeout 60;
proxy_connect_timeout 60;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO "";
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/thoughtlessbanter.com/$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;
if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
}
}
location ~ \.php {
include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
keepalive_timeout 30;
proxy_read_timeout 60;
proxy_connect_timeout 60;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO "";
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/thoughtlessbanter.com/$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI $request_uri;
fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_URI $document_uri;
fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT $document_root;
fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL $server_protocol;
fastcgi_param GATEWAY_INTERFACE CGI/1.1;
fastcgi_param SERVER_SOFTWARE nginx/$nginx_version;
fastcgi_param REMOTE_ADDR $remote_addr;
fastcgi_param REMOTE_PORT $remote_port;
fastcgi_param SERVER_ADDR $server_addr;
fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT $server_port;
fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME $server_name;
fastcgi_param REDIRECT_STATUS 200;
fastcgi_read_timeout 60;
}
}