Question

Well, I’m wondering if theres a way to run both rails and PHP on Lighty, on Ubuntu. I want to run both my PHP projects and Rails projects on the one server/domain.

I have little experience with Linux really, so forgive my naivety.

If theres a way of doing this please let me know 🙂

Answer 1

It’s really quite simple to run them both. I do it all the time (ROR to run Redmine, and PHP for the rest).

You have 2 real options for ROR. Either serve it from FastCGI (what I do), or run it with a standalone server (like Mongrel, etc) and proxy to it. Both have advantages. FastCGI has the advantage that it’s self-contained (no secondary server to run). The standalone has the advantage that it’s easier to configure.

If you have specific questions, I can guide, but there are guides on the internet on how to do this.

My lighttpd.conf:

$HTTP["host"] =~ "my.ror.site" {
    server.error-handler-404="/dispatch.fcgi"
    fastcgi.server = (".fcgi" => ("ror_1" => (
            "min-procs"=>8,
            "max-procs" => 8,
            "socket" => "/tmp/myrorlock.fastcgi",
            "bin-path"=> "/path/to/ror/site/public/dispatch.fcgi",
            "kill-signal" => 9,
            "bin-environment" => ( "RAILS_ENV" => "production" )
    )))
}

fastcgi.server = ( ".php" =>
    (
        (
            "socket" => "/tmp/php-fastcgi.socket",
            "bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php-cgi -c /etc/php.ini",
            "min-procs" => 1,
            "disable-time" => 1,
            "max-procs" => 1,
            "idle-timeout" => 20,
            "broken-scriptfilename" => "enable",
            "bin-copy-environment"=> (
                "PATH", "SHELL", "USER"
            ),
            "bin-environment" => (
                "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "40",
                "PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUEST" => "50000"
            )
        )
    )
)

And that’s it. Note the kill-signal option. that’s important, otherwise you’ll wind up with zombie processes everywhere every time you restart the server…