Ruby & Rails using Passenger

Monday, July 28th, 2008

I have been toying with a MySQL server at work for loading data from a legacy database and creating user accounts in Microsoft’s Active Directory. I am using linux along with MySQL, Ruby and the Rails framework. While I am certainly no über-expert at this, I am finding the task not only manageable, but altogether pleasant. My current workflow looks like this:

  1. Mount Windows share using Samba
  2. Load data into MySQL and perform a bunch of transformations on it
  3. TODO: script creation of Active Directory accounts from MySQL Database (Python??)

I found that I needed to view the data as I was testing the MySQL transformations, so I turned to Ruby and Rails. I have not had a great deal of luck in the past with configuring Apache to serve up dynamic content via Mongrel or lighty, so I decided to give Passenger a go. For those of you that are unaware, Passenger works directly with Apache and requires almost no configuration. It is dead simple to use. So, within a matter of minutes (minus the time to tweak my database to conform to the Rails conventions) I had a web site up and running to display my data as I was testing it!

Open Source Software is becoming (for me at least) a more viable solution to the problems I face than the proprietary alternatives. The wealth of information available and the relative ease with which a great deal of work can be done is amazing.

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Debian + Ruby + Gem + Rails + Mongrel = RubyOnRails

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

After much frustration, I think I finally have a working installation recipe for RubyOnRails on Debian Linux.

  1. Install Debian
  2. Install ssh and sudo

    3. apt-get install ssh sudo

  3. Remove “root” login from ssh config file
  4. Create a “source” directory

    5. cd /
    mkdir source

  5. Install tools for compiling from various sources

    6. apt-get install gcc gcc-3.4-doc gcc-3.4 g++-3.4 make libc6-dev flex openssl curl wget zlib1g-dev libzlib-ruby

  6. Download latest Ruby (1.8.5 as of this entry), unpack and install

    7. cd /source
    wget http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.5-p2.tar.gz
    tar xzvf ruby-1.8.5-p2.tar.gz
    cd ruby-1.8.5
    ./configure
    make
    make install
    cd ..

  7. Download, unpack, compile and install zlib (not included in testing version of Ruby?)

    8. wget http://www.blue.sky.or.jp/atelier/ruby/ruby-zlib-0.6.0.tar.gz
    tar xzvf ruby-zlib-0.6.0.tar.gz
    cd ruby-zlib-0.6.0
    ruby extconf.rb
    make
    make install
    cd ..

  8. Download, unpack, compile and install Ruby Gems (0.9.2 as of this entry)

    9. cd /source/
    wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/17190/rubygems-0.9.2.tgz
    tar xzvf rubygems-0.9.2.tgz
    cd rubygems-0.9.2
    ruby setup.rb

  9. Install Rails

    10. gem install rails --include-dependencies

  10. Install Mongrel

    11. gem install mongrel mongrel_cluster --include-dependencies

  11. Create a dummy application

    12. cd ~/
    rails test
    mongrel_rails start

  12. Go to http://your.ip.address:3000/ to see if it works

    13. Sources

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Linux

Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

It may just be me, but it seems as though Linux has been in the news with increasing frequency. It seems like a giant snowball is beginning to form and may have the potential to be a serious game changer. With the upgrade to Vista looming in a dark corner for most organizations, it seems like once passed over alternatives are looking considerably more viable. As one who works in the IT industry, I am all for it! While I don’t dislike Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system, it is definitely lacking. The next version of Microsoft’s operating system, entitled Vista does offer some new features, but it is a fear of the unknown security flaws that makes me less than enthusiastic about it. Being a complete Linux noob, I have quite a few questions and concerns, most of them concerning integrating Linux into our existing server environment. I am sure that these questions all have answers, I just don’t know them yet!

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My first post from a Linux machine

Wednesday, June 28th, 2006

So, I installed Ubuntu Linux on a laptop and I am posting to my very own weblog from Firefox which is running in Ubuntu Linux. I have to admit that the installation was seemless, and the GUI looks very nice. I am definitely intrigued!

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