3 posts tagged “slicehost”
As I started to research this topic, there are several Slicehost tutorials on setting up various configurations. But there is a Slicehost blog entry that references the deprec stuff mentioned earlier.
Mongrel is apparently the darling of the Rails community. According to its homepage:
But I keep reading about how to configure other web servers (Apache, Lighttpd, Nginx) as reverse proxies for Mongrel.
Mongrel is a fast HTTP library and server for Ruby that is intended for hosting Ruby web applications of any kind using plain HTTP rather than FastCGI or SCGI.
Installing Rails on a fresh Ubuntu Gutsy (non-Slicehost specific) install is described here.
The first thing to consider is which supported Linux distro to use. (The comparison page, which turns out is not actually that useful.) This list is not exhaustive, however, as I also ran across a few discussions (and a podcast) about the use of Arch Linux when I came across this Slicehost blog entry that announces support for it.
While Arch may be great, my initial concern is that there are no Slicehost tutorials like there are for using Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon 7.10). I feel like as a n00b, I need to follow the trodden path until I have enough expertise to head into the woods without a guide.
I'm going to follow the peepcode tutorial on using deprec (deployment recipes for capistrano)
is recommended for app deployment. (I normally do
everything manually, since I like to know what is actually going on
before I trust things to a set of scripts. But I'm going to follow these instructions for now, then perhaps get a little more adventurous.)
While I was downloading Ubuntu, I followed the first step I was supposed to take on my development machine (OS X). Now, I have a fairly clean box, having only installed the latest Ruby and Gems components. The peepcode tutorial doesn't mention anything about prerequisistes. The first step is:
sudo gem install deprec --include-dependencies
Since nothing ever goes smoothly, I received the following:
I found a Japanese post that has something that looks similar to this error and it suggests using '--no-rdoc', which I add to the install command and rerun it. It then appears that everything is installed correctly. (Perhaps Matz is already aware of it?)
Successfully installed rake-0.8.1
Successfully installed needle-1.3.0
Successfully installed net-ssh-1.1.2
Successfully installed net-sftp-1.1.0
Successfully installed capistrano-1.4.1
Successfully installed deprec-1.9.2
6 gems installed
Installing ri documentation for rake-0.8.1...
Installing ri documentation for needle-1.3.0...
Installing ri documentation for net-ssh-1.1.2...
ERROR: While executing gem ... (ArgumentError)
invalid mbstring sequence
During the installation of Ubuntu, I didn't have a proper internet connection at the time and received a warning about its inability to update the security settings. I'll have to check into that later, I guess.
After restarting Ubuntu, I followed the VMWare suggestion of installing the VMWare Tools. I followed the instructions I found here. Just to be safe, I restarted.
I had cause today to look into Rails VPS hosting services. I came across the Nuby on Rails article with a ton of comments which serve to validate and clarify various points. More searching turned up similar reviews. There is even a Rails-specific hosting info site.
Slicehost appears to be the best choice for my needs (a small, mainly static Rails app). The minimum plan is $20/mo for 256MB RAM, 10GB space, 100GB bandwidth. This is all way more than I actually need.
I'm trying to understand the hosting options before I get going on my development effort. I'd like for my dev setup to be as close as possible to my deployed/hosted setup. I'll be using VMWare on my MacBook Pro for this purpose. (I'm not going to be fussing with IronRuby for this project.)
