Deploying Ruby on Rails apps on VPS

Tools

• chef-solo
• librarian-chef
• knife-solo
• bundler
• nginx
• postgreSQL
• unicorn
• rbenv

Getting started

Setting up VPS

To start you need a VPS to which you can connect through ssh. Assume we have one and we can connect to it via:

$ ssh vps.com

Domain name is also required as we want to serve apps using subdomains. Let's say we have a vps.com domain pointed to our VPS IP address.

VPS needs ruby, nginx, unicorn and all the staff to run RoR apps. chef-solo will help us with installation of the tools.

First we need to create a node for our VPS under the nodes/ directory. Node will run 3 roles:

• bootstrap (setting up locale, install nodejs, rbenv).
• web (nginx)
• database (postgresql)

# nodes/vps.com.json

{
  "run_list": [
    "role[bootstrap]",
    "role[web]",
    "role[database]"
  ]
}

Install gems before you start cooking VPS ($ gem install bundler if you don't have it yet):

$ bundle install

You can fetch cookbooks if you want:

$ librarian-chef install

To prepare&cook vps run:

knife solo bootstrap vps

For sure you have a great RoR app and you cannot wait any longer to show your application to the world. Let's do this!

Create a role for app (name can be the same as application name) which runs "rails_app" recipe:

# roles/example_app.json

{
  "json_class": "Chef::Role",
  "run_list": [
    "recipe[rails_app]"
  ],
  "override_attributes": {
    "app_name": "example_app",
    "authorized_keys": [
      "ssh-rsa AsadsadsecretZZZ [email protected]",
      "ssh-rsa AsadsadsecretZZZ [email protected]",
      "ssh-rsa BsadsadsecretZZZ [email protected]"
    ]
  }
}

Application will be available under subdomain, in this case: http://example_app.vps.com. In addition to the created role still need a node to run application role:

# nodes/example_app.vps.com.json

{
  "run_list": [
    "role[example_app]"
  ]
}

To cook this node you need ssh config for example_app.vps.com for example:

Host example_app.vps.com
  HostName vps.com
  User example_app
  ForwardAgent yes
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/me_rsa

Cook application node as a root user

knife solo cook root@example_app.com.vps

VPS is ready to go, all thats left is to deploy RoR application source code via Capistrano.

Rails Application

Add capistrano and unicorn gems to Gemfile:

# Gemfile

gem 'capistrano', '3.2.1'
gem 'capistrano-rails'
gem 'capistrano-rbenv', '~> 2.0'

group :production do
  gem 'unicorn', '4.8.3'
end

Next bundle new gems:

$ bundle install

Create file Capfile into application root folder:

# Capfile

require 'capistrano/setup'
require 'capistrano/deploy'
require 'capistrano/rbenv'
require 'capistrano/bundler'
require 'capistrano/rails/assets'
require 'capistrano/rails/migrations'

Create config/deploy.rb file:

# config/deploy.rb

lock '3.2.1'

set :application, 'example_app'
set :repo_url, '[email protected]:username/example_app.git'

set :rbenv_custom_path, '/usr/local/rbenv'
set :rbenv_ruby, '2.1.5'

set :pty, true
set :sudo_prompt, ""
set :linked_files, %w{
  config/database.yml
  config/nginx.production.conf
  config/secrets.yml
  config/unicorn.rb
  config/unicorn_init.sh
}
set :linked_dirs, %w{ tmp log }
set :scm, :git
set :tmp_dir, "/home/#{fetch(:application)}/tmp"

namespace :deploy do
  %w{start stop restart}.each do |command|
    desc "#{command} unicorn server"
    task command do
      on roles(:app) do
        execute "service unicorn_#{fetch(:application)} #{command}"
      end
    end
  end
  after :finishing, :restart
end

and create a production deployment config file:

# config/deploy/production.rb

set :branch, :master
set :deploy_to, '/home/example_app/production'

server 'example_app.vps.com',
  user: 'example_app',
  roles: %w{ web app db },
  ssh_options: {
    forward_agent: true
  }

Also remember to add database.yml and secret.yml to .gitignore as those files are already on VPS and commit all your changes.

We're almost there... Let's deploy our app on VPS finally:

$ bundle exec cap production deploy

Application is live! Yay!

Installation on localhost using Vagrant with VirtualBox

You need Vagrant and VirtualBox installed:

• DOWNLOAD Vagrant
• DOWNLOAD VirtualBox

In chef-vps directory run:

$ bundle install

install Vagrant plugins:

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-omnibus

then bring vagrant machine up and running:

$ vagrant up --provision

that creates the environment, provisioning is run and that's all.

Check this out :)

$ vagrant ssh

###Copyright and license

Code released under the MIT license.