Question

I would like to run a rails app under a subdirectory on my Linux VPS, and having trawled the passenger documentation I am unsure as to how to set up the proper virtualhost config and symlinks for my machine.

I have a domain called http://www.domain.eu and a rails app located at /apps/webapp, and i would like the site to be hosted at http://www.domain.eu/webapp

Im am unsure of a few areas:

1.) Where should i enter the webapp VirtualHost config details? should it be in the apache2.conf file or should create a file in sites-available called webapp and put the config in there? There seems to be many conflicting examples.

2.) Learning from the previous question, how could I amend this apache2.conf file to serve up the rails app under the directory www.domain.eu/webapp (again read through lots of docs, but there seems to be many ways of doing this)

<VirtualHost *:80>
      ServerName domain.eu
      # !!! Be sure to point DocumentRoot to 'public'!
      DocumentRoot /apps/webapp/public
      <Directory /apps/webapp/public>
         # This relaxes Apache security settings.
         AllowOverride all
         # MultiViews must be turned off.
         Options -MultiViews
      </Directory>

      RailsBaseURI /webapp
      <Directory /apps/webapp/public>
        Options -MultiViews
      </Directory>
   </VirtualHost>

3.) I realise that a symlink needs to be created to point the directory root to the url. Having tried ln -s /apps/webapp/public ./test it comes back with a missing symlink error. What would be recommended here?

4.) Lastly, rails 3 config.action_controller.relative_url_root = "/webapp" appears to be deprecated, is there a new recommended convention to use?

my setup: Linux VPS server running Ubuntu 10.04, mysql 5, apache2, phusion passenger (latest), ruby 1.9.3 and rails 3.2.3.

If anyone needs more code just shout, thanks in advance!

Answer 1

So after much reading I managed to get this working.

For my purpose I added in the VirtualHost info for a sub URI site into the bottom my apache2.conf file, it may be httpd.conf for you, but you can enter these into /etc/apache2/sites-available if you wish to keep it all seperate.

At the top of this file I specify where the default “homepage” for the server is. I am running apache2 so my homepage is located at /var/www. Below this we set our rails Sub URI options, so firstly specify what URL you would like as your sub URI, then point the directory tag to the public folder of your rails app. MultiViews must be off hence the (-) so our apache2.conf file is complete.

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName domain.com
        DocumentRoot /var/www
        <Directory /var/www>
        Allow from all
        </Directory>


        RailsBaseURI /webapp
        <Directory /apps/webapp/public>
        Options -MultiViews
        </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Now all we have to do is create a symlink in our sites-enabled folder to point the /var/www/webapp to our /apps/webapp/public folder, which looks like this.

ln -s /apps/webapp/public /var/www/webapp

Now was we are creating a symlink, we don’t have to insert any extra code into our rails routes or environment file. You can specify which environment you would like to use using RackENV production (aparently al rails 3 + apps are rack ? please comment if this is not the case)