Recently there had been work being done to add FastCGI access to the Linux Hosting plan which already offers PHP5, Python 2.4 and Perl 5. Ruby is still not available on the system as a whole; however, that doesn’t stop you from adding it to your own account which is precisely what I did. Armed with the ability to test out FastCGI I proceeded to work on getting a very simple test RoR app setup and running.

To start with I needed to get Ruby installed. To do this I simply logged into my shell account (another great feature of Web.com’s Linux Hosting) and proceeded to download the necessary sources:

$ wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.7-p174.tar.gz

$ wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/60718/rubygems-1.3.5.tgz

With the source downloaded I then extracted them into the tmp/ directory in my account and built them.

$ tar -xzf ruby-1.8.7-p174.tar.gz -C tmp/

$ tar -xzf rubygems-1.3.5.tgz -C tmp/

$ cd tmp/ruby-1.8.7-p174/

$ ./configure –prefix=$HOME

$ make

$ make install

$ cd ~/tmp/rubygems-1.3.5/

$ ruby setup.rb

With this completed you should have Ruby 1.8.7 and RubyGem 1.3.5 ready to go. You can test by running the following couple of commands:

$ ruby -v

ruby 1.8.7 (2009-06-12 patchlevel 174) [i686-linux]

$ gem -v

1.3.5

Now we’re ready to rock and roll… We just need a few gems to be thrown in and we’ll have Ruby on Rails ready to go and be able to use MySQL for the database. So we’ll start off with the basics…

$ gem install rails mysql fcgi

This should install any other gems that are necessary for dependencies and you can check the final list of gems installed running gem list later if you’re curious to see them all. Now would also be a good time to go ahead and clean-up your tmp/ directory as you won’t be needing all that source any more so why use up the disk resources.

Now we just need a Rails application to run, so we’ll start out with building one from scratch although if you have one ready to go then you could just upload it to your home directory. For purposes of this I’m just going to setup a Rails webapp aptly called “test” as follows:

$ rails -D -d mysql ~/test

Now we just need to go create our webapps public/.htaccess file with the necessary configuration settings. For my example I used the following for my .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI

<IfModule mod_fastcgi.c>

AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi

</IfModule>

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^$ index.html [QSA]

RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

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

</IfModule>

Armed with this we just need to setup the virtual host. I set this up as test.example.com so it ran isolated from my regular non-Rails website. To do this I logged into my support account (outside scope of this entry) and setup test.example.com as a website content path as /test/public. Then while still logged into the support site created the necessary database tables test_development and test_production. You could also setup separate database uses at this time for the databases as well if you liked.

Once the databases were created I needed to edit the test/config/database.yml file with the necessary database name and credentials. Also set the database host to the appropriate hostname provided for your account. You’ll then need to setup and migrate the database.

$ cd ~/test

$ rake db:migrate

$ rake db:setup

Everything done you’re now ready to test it out and see if it all works. If you open up your browser and go to http://test.example.com and you should see the default Ruby on Rails welcome page. If you click on the “About your application’s environment” link it should drop-down and show you the version information for your Rails application. From here you’re ready to begin the rest of your webapp development.

If you have any Rails experience, are interested and don’t have a problem working on an adult-oriented website then please get in touch with a sample of your work. Given the nature of the site and the fact it is in stealth development mode we have to be vague on the details at this time.