opensoul.org

RPMs for Deploying Rails on CentOS

Thanks to mongrel, Ruby on Rails deployment is finally decent. Several weeks back I switched all of our servers over to using Apache 2.2 with mod_proxy_balancer, mongrel and mongrel_cluster, and I haven’t had any problems.

Unfortunately, since most of our servers run CentOS (repackaged RedHat Enterprise Server 4), the setup isn’t as easy as it could be since it ships with Apache 2.0 and ruby 1.8.2, which doesn’t work with Rails. So I’ve rebuilt all the necessary RPMs (and more) and made them available to make deploying a snap. Note: these packages should also work on RedHat Enterprise Linux 4, however, I have not tested them.

Yum configuration

Download or create the yum config in /etc/yum.repos.d/ file with the following contents:

[ci]
name=[i] Collective Idea RPM Repository
baseurl=http://source.collectiveidea.com/pub/linux/centos/4/i386
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
gpgkey=http://source.collectiveidea.com/pub//RPM-GPG-KEY

Install Packages

To install the packages, run:

yum install httpd ruby ruby-devel rubygems ri
Note: If you already have Apache and other modules installed, this command may fail. You can try running yum upgrade, or you may just need to remove the packages before you install the new packages. If you’re using any packages, such as other Apache modules, that I haven’t rebuilt against Apache 2.2, let me know and I can add them.

Install Gems

Install the gems you need by running:

gem install -y rails mongrel mongrel_cluster

Configure Apache and Mongrel

Lastly, follow one of the guides for configuring Apache and mongrel.

Let me know if you have any problems with these packages.

linux, rails, and rpm August 02, 2006

21 Comments

  1. August August August 7, 2006

    I’ve tried to install your httpd package on our CentOS box (in order to get mod_proxy_balancer so I can use mongrel_cluster), but we end up with three errors (we already have httpd 2.0.52-22.ent.centos4 installed):

    Error: Missing Dependency: httpd-mmn = 20020903 is needed by package php
    Error: Missing Dependency: libaprutil-0.so.0 is needed by package subversion
    Error: Missing Dependency: libapr-0.so.0 is needed by package subversion

    Any idea what may cause this?

  2. Brandon Brandon August 7, 2006

    You need to install php and subversion from our repository, They’ve been rebuilt against the new versions of apache. If you added the yum configuration, you should just be able to do:

    yum upgrade httpd php subversion

    If that fails, your best bet may just be to remove the old versions of apache, php and subversion, then try to install the new ones.

  3. Jared Jared August 14, 2006

    Thank for the easy upgrade help.

    One problem is that I am getting a similar error for mod_perl on a clean Centos 4.3 test box.

    Error: Missing Dependency: httpd-mmn = 20020903 is needed by package mod_perl
    Error: Missing Dependency: libaprutil-0.so.0 is needed by package mod_perl
    Error: Missing Dependency: libapr-0.so.0 is needed by package mod_perl

  4. Jared Jared August 14, 2006

    I removed mod_perl with yum and the install/update goes fine. This is o.k. since mp in Centos 4.3 is 1.99_16-4 and would be removed/updated anyway.

  5. Brandon Brandon August 14, 2006

    Yeah, any Apache modules need to be rebuilt. I don’t use mod_perl, so I hadn’t rebuilt it yet. But I will get it rebuilt and put it in the repository if you want it.

  6. hernan hernan August 29, 2006

    Hi,
    thanks for the repo!
    I need add libcurl to php, do I’ve to use your the php5.src.rpm and recompile, right?
    Can you give me some advice, thks

  7. Nathan Nathan October 7, 2006

    Thanks for the donation of time and resources to the community.

    Everything has worked fine except when I get to using gem. I enter the following command:
    gem install -y rails mongrel mongrel_cluster

    And it fails with:
    /usr/bin/gem:3:in `require’: no such file to load — rubygems (LoadError)
    from /usr/bin/gem:3

    What I noticed then was two Ruby library paths:
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8
    /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8

    It appears to be searching in /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8 where rubygems isn’t. So, to rectify this I ran:
    export RUBYLIB=/usr/lib/ruby/1.8

    This settles the first error, but RUBYLIB needs to be permanently set this way (/etc/bashrc ??). And afterwards I am left with this:

    Attempting local installation of ‘rails’
    Local gem file not found: rails*.gem
    Attempting remote installation of ‘rails’
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:204:in `report_activate_error’: Could not find RubyGem sources (> 0.0.0) (Gem::LoadError)
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:141:in `activate’
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:37:in `require_gem_with_options’
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:31:in `require_gem’
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/remote_installer.rb:425:in `sources’
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/remote_installer.rb:435:in `source_index_hash’
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/remote_installer.rb:399:in `install’
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/gem_commands.rb:195:in `execute’
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/gem_commands.rb:153:in `each’
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/gem_commands.rb:153:in `execute’
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/command.rb:49:in `invoke’
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/cmd_manager.rb:94:in `process_args’
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/cmd_manager.rb:67:in `run’
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/gem_runner.rb:13:in `run’
    from /usr/bin/gem:17

    This was a whopper, but I finally found the solution here:
    http://geoffreyarnold.com/index.php/wiki/changeblog

    You need to manually install the sources gem:
    gem install /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/cache/sources-0.0.1.gem

    Then gem seems to work great!

  8. Brandon Brandon October 8, 2006

    hmm, did you have your own version of Ruby and/or rubygems in your path that was overridding the RPMs?

  9. Nathan Nathan October 8, 2006

    I don’t think so, but it I’m not certain. I did try a complete removal of ruby, ri, rubygems, rdoc, etc then reinstalling from your repos, but still had the same failure.

  10. opensoul.org » x86_64 RPMs for deploying Rails on Centos opensoul.org » x86_64 RPMs for deploying Rails on Centos October 9, 2006

    […] I’ve built RPMs for deploying Apache 2.2 + Mongrel on x86_64 CentOS. Download the yum config to /etc/yum.repos.d/. Check out the post about the 32bit RPMS for more information. […]

  11. Dennis Dennis October 18, 2006

    Brandon,

    I am getting a 404 error on the “/headers/header.info” that yum tries to access — has this repository stopped being available? Please check, and update if needed.

    Thanks,
    Dennis

  12. Brandon Brandon October 18, 2006

    Dennis,

    It sounds like you’re using an old version of yum. As far as I know, yum doesn’t use the headers/header.info file any more. Try doing “yum update yum” first.

    Brandon

  13. Brian Morykon Brian Morykon October 20, 2006

    Brandon,

    Mongrel won’t startup on my CentOS 4.3 slicehost slice. Ideas? Looks like I’m not the only one:

    http://rubyforge.org/forum/forum.php?thread_id=9188&forum_id=5450

    Here’s the error:

    /usr/lib64/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-0.3.13.4/lib/mongrel/rails.rb:38: uninitialized constant Mongrel::HttpHandler (NameError)
    from /usr/lib64/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:21:in `require’
    from /usr/lib64/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-0.3.13.4/bin/mongrel_rails:10
    from /usr/bin/mongrel_rails:18

  14. Brian Morykon Brian Morykon October 20, 2006

    I figured out my issue. GCC and make weren’t installed.

    yum install make gcc

    Then reinstall mongrel

    gem install -y mongrel mongrel_cluster

  15. dswift dswift November 2, 2006

    If you are having trouble getting the correct php to install, try ‘yum —disablerepo=* —enablerepo=ci install php’

  16. Vlad Mihai Vlad Mihai November 29, 2006

    Hi guys,

    I have a little problem, when trying to do a ‘yum install —disablerepo=* —enablerepo=ci httpd’ i get the following
    error ‘Error: Missing Dependency: gcc = 3.4.5 is needed by package apr-devel’ but a ‘rpm -qa | grep gcc’ gives the following results ‘gcc-3.4.6-3’
    ‘libgcc-3.4.6-3’
    ‘gcc-c++-3.4.6-3’
    Can someone please help me on this issue? the Centos that i am using is 4.4.
    Thanks

  17. Brandon Brandon December 4, 2006

    Vlad Mihai: Do you by chance have a version of apr-devel already installed?

  18. Jared Jared April 4, 2007

    I have used these for several months and so far it’s working great.

    One question.

    Is it possible to get the sript/console from these rpms?

  19. Brandon Brandon April 5, 2007

    script/console comes from Rails, do you mean irb?

    yum install ruby-irb
  20. Mathieu Mathieu December 30, 2008

    none of the four links your provided for configuring Apache and mongrel works.

  21. Richard Luck Richard Luck October 27, 2011

    Hi – We have several dozen servers we deployed this solution on approx 18 months ago. Now, however, we encounter errors when building new servers. The repo http://source.collectiveidea.com/pub/linux/centos/4/i386 has disappeared.

    Is there a replacement repo to be found somewhere?

Post a Comment

Comments use textile. Anonymous comments will be deleted.

My name is Brandon Keepers. I like to build things, usually in Ruby or JavaScript. I work at GitHub and live in Holland, MI.

Popular Posts