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Deploying Ruby

I’ve recently moved over to the world of ruby on rails to develop portlets for Ovosuite. Coming from a J2EE background, I can say it’s a breath of fresh air: everything 'feels' light and nimble again... no massive build times, no waiting for containers to deploy, no CMP weirdness.... (Although active record can still give you a turn).

Admittedly my experience with ruby is very minimal, so when it came time to get the services running on our production environment, things became a little painful. Its the usual ruby set-up: apache2 + fast-cgi running on Linux (debian).

A couple of things I've learnt from the experience:

1:DO NOT USE p STATEMENTS!

The application I was deploying has debug 'p' statements (if your unaware, the p statement will print to stdout) littered through the code. This was causing a weird error: "malformed header from script. Bad header= XXX" to appear in my apache logs. It took me a little longer than usual to fix this one because I haven’t used cgi before (my web based skills went from ASP to PHP then onto J2EE). CGI takes the output (stdout) of the application and treats that as the HTTP payload for the web page. During development, rails runs using its internal HTTP server where 'p' statements appear on the console (convenient for debugging), but in a production environment (fast-cgi), those same p statements will be embedded in the server response, which apache cant handle.

The lesson from this is to use the rails logging facilities :) (Although what a really want for Xmas is a full debug environment with stepping and variable inspection etc.. I suppose I’ve been spoilt by java in that regard)

2:Watch what you keep in your session.

Rails has a nifty way of storing sessions (completely serialised to disk (or other)) to allow massive scalability potential. Unfortunately, after a restart, it looses track of what libraries are in use, so it may not be able to de-serialize the session again if you have something a bit exotic in there. This was the case for my the TZInfo: a cool time zone library we use. Apparently it uses a bunch of internal classes in the background to handle each time zone, so even if you have require_gem 'tzinfo' and include TZInfo in your code, it still cannot find your classes when loading the session. The easy way around this is to write a wrapper function that gets the time zone based on the string identifier stored in the session.

3.Basic Linux stuff.

OK, I'm the coder, not the Linux guy in the company, so there are a few other 'obvious' things:

Make sure execute permissions are on dispatch.fcgi

Make sure the shebang in dispatch.fcgi is pointing to /usr/local/bin/ruby

Make sure www-data can write to tmp, log and read everything else

Make sure you change the re-write run in public/.htaccess to use fast cgi instead of cgi:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.cgi [QSA,L] should be RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]

That’s about it for now...

Posted on Wednesday, July 12, 2006 at 10:43AM by Registered CommenterOvosuite Team | Comments5 Comments | References69 References

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Reader Comments (5)

I released version 0.3.0 of TZInfo a couple of days ago. Amongst other things, this release will now let you store Timezones in the session directly. The only requirement to make this work is putting require_gem 'tzinfo' in your environment.rb file.
July 20, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterPhil Ross
I can't tell you how much I appreciate you sharing your experience. I'm running rails on Apache / CGI (Win) and had some controllers that worked and some that didn't. The problem - 'puts' statements that were outputting to stdout just like you say. Thanks for saving my head from meeting the wall yet again.
August 4, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterBricklord
Thanks for clarifying the 'puts' handling of fcgi. I was scratching my head for awhile about this.
December 16, 2006 | Unregistered Commenterdave
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