I don’t know if you’ve noticed but the spec sheet for ‘Gutsy’ included a new version of the ‘init’ replacement Upstart that is supposed to provide monitoring and process management. That may mean Rubyworks is obsolete before it gets started!

NeilW

I have been using “set :use_sudo, false” in my capistrano deploy.rb and deploying as the user that owns the mongrel processes. But I won’t be at all surprised when you point out the case where this won’t work! :-)

Thanks for the great tips, I joined rubyonrails-stack and rubyonrails-deployment, and I’m going to check out the xen-tools package, it looks useful. Also, I’m looking forward to rubyworks being released so I can try it out.

You need to be able to ’sudo’ to make certain changes to the web-server in Capistrano. It is a right royal pain, and I wonder whether it could be abstracted away with a set of setuid scripts. That would get rid of the need for root completely.

If you haven’t downloaded the ‘xen-tools’ package you might want to do so. I contributed the Fiesty adaption scripts in there, and you may find them useful for your image. To be honest if you could get your setup to work as a ‘xen-tools’ role script that would make auto-creation a doddle.

If you haven’t joined the Google Group ‘rubyonrails-stack’, you might want to do so. That and ‘rubyonrails-deployment’.

http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-stack
http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-deployment

Rgs

NeilW

Thanks for the help. Re locale, what you do is export LC_CTYPE=C etc for all of them then dpkg-reconfigure locales and it all seems to magically work. :-)

The login problem is fixed in the version that I’m going to make public very soon, perhaps today if I have time. I’m not sure why but fetching the public key by http was often failing (anyone know why?). The public key is also made available in /mnt and it’s there reliably so the script now falls back to that if the http get fails.

As for the locale problem I haven’t seen that myself but make sure you still have the package “locales” installed, and you could also install the package “localeconf”. If localeconf is installed you can type “sudo dpkg-reconfigure localeconf” and it will prompt you to configure the localization settings. For US English choose “en_US.utf-8″ as your locale.

perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale (”C”).
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

Every single time I start it though it doesnt get the login credentials and I have to reboot it. Any ideas?

Thanks for the suggestions.

Regarding no root login: The reason I didn’t attach the public key to a user with sudo ability instead of root is that by default you need a password to invoke sudo, and I didn’t want to create a user with a known password. The solution to this might be setting “PasswordAuthentication no” in sshd_config, and then maybe allowing sudo without authentication for that user (what’s the point in requiring the password at the sudo prompt if it’s known publicly anyway), and then perhaps also randomizing the user password just to be paranoid. But really how is a user with unauthenticated sudo access better than just allowing root login?

I have a new version almost ready to go with a regular user (who can only log in with the private key) to be more capistrano-friendly. But I don’t think the user that the rails app runs as should have sudo access at all, especially if sudo without authentication is allowed (you might as well just run the app as root!). I’ll think about this one some more, comments and suggestions are welcome!

Regarding RubyWorks and nginx: I don’t know what’s in RubyWorks, at the moment their web page just says that it’s a “production stack of application and environment tools”, which to me means a re-packaging of existing open-source tools. I’m definitely interested in nginx but there’s no debian package yet which makes it a lot more effort to maintain. I’ll get around to trying it sooner or later regardless of that though.

Regarding the licencing of the script: I’d like the whole image to be available under some sort of open source license, I guess it needs to be GPL because it’s a repackaging of GNU/Linux, but I don’t know much about licencing and haven’t looked into that yet. I’ll think about that!

It would be better if you attached the uploaded public/private keypair to a user ‘deploy’ with sudo capability. That would be more in keeping with the Ubuntu way of doing things (and it makes it more in keeping with the way Capistrano works).

Have you open-sourced the script that builds this image?

Rather than using Mongrel Cluster directly, you may want to consider Rubyworks - which takes mongrel up to the next level. That would allow you to dispense with Apache and its internal balancer and move to the ‘latest thing’ in web servers which is ‘nginx’.

Antonio: To use use postgres instead of MySQL just run aptitude, deselect mysql-client and mysql-server (which will force removal of other packages like libmysql-ruby and php5-mysql), and then install the appropriate postresql packages.

As for capazon, I think that’s more of a client side thing for starting and stopping instances, I’m pretty sure you could use it with this image (perhaps instead of installing Amazon’s java-based tools? I’m not sure if it uses them or not). I could pre-install it on the next version of this image though if that would be useful.

http://capazon.rubyforge.org/

Cheers

Thanks

Unfortunately you need to set a short TTL for your DNS records though, because EC2 instances have a dynamically assigned IP address. As long as the instance is running, including across reboots, it will keep the same external IP address, but if you replace it with a new instance for any reason you will need to change the address for that record.

thanks again for the tutorial on rebundling the AMI.

Thanks for this, it has saved me time. If you need any assistance on the image I’d be happy to help.

This is my first attempt at a production-ready Ruby on Rails setup so I appreciate any other tips & suggestions…

I was comparing to how mongrel was setup from this post.

http://blog.codahale.com/2006/06/19/time-for-a-grown-up-server-rails-mongrel-apache-capistrano-and-you/

John