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Introducing RUMP

02 May 2007

Many of you have heard of web application deployment using the LAMP set of technologies that came into vogue a few years ago. Later, MARS was thrown about as a four-letter acronym to describe a Rails-centric deployment scheme, but some of the choices (Solaris? Apache? Please.) leave me cold.

So, without further ado, let me introduce you to RUMP:

Why these choices? Well, Rails goes without saying (if you aren’t interested in Rails, then RUMP is not for you); Ubuntu because it offers a lightweight server config with a package system that is even better than Debian’s; Mongrel because it’s currently the best web server targetted at Ruby application deployment and is getting better all the time; and Postgresql because MySQL, despite all the good it’s done for the world, still falls behind on a number of features.

To help get you started, what follows is a reasonably accurate description of what I went through to get my RUMP in gear. I had occasion to do this a couple times within a few days a little while ago, and kept some reasonably complete notes as I went along. Hopefully this will help others experience the satisfaction of a nice, fit RUMP.

Wherever possible, I’ve tried to find the simplest configuration that works. Of course each component can be installed and configured in a variety of ways, and YMMV. For what it’s worth, the following is what seems to be working well for me.

Installation notes for RUMP deployment server (running ubuntu 6.10 “edgy eft”)

I started off with an empty image installed by my hosting company of choice. This was a bare-bones Ubuntu server install, containing a single root account with ssh enabled, and pretty much nothing else.

First, log in to your new system and use adduser to create a user named “deploy” with homedir /home/deploy, and then run visudo to let the “deploy” user run commands with sudo. Then log in as “deploy” and do the rest of this.

Start off with editing /etc/apt/sources.list to enable some packages:

deb http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy main restricted
deb-src http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy main restricted

## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the
## distribution.
deb http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy-updates main restricted
deb-src http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy-updates main restricted

## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the 'universe'
## repository.
## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu
## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to
## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in
## universe WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu security
## team.
 deb http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy universe
# deb-src http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy universe

## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the 'backports'
## repository.
## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as
## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes
## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features.
## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review
## or updates from the Ubuntu security team.
 deb http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy-backports main restricted universe multiverse
# deb-src http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy-backports main restricted universe multiverse


deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu edgy-security main restricted
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu edgy-security main restricted
# deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu edgy-security universe
# deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu edgy-security universe

After that, run sudo apt-get update to get the latest package definitions, and then start installing:

Some common tools you will surely need at some point:

sudo apt-get install man curl wget

and some dev tools for later compilation steps

sudo aptitude install build-essential

Time for ruby:

sudo apt-get install ruby ri rdoc irb ri1.8 ruby1.8-dev libzlib-ruby zlib1g

and then postgres:

sudo apt-get install postgresql-8.2
sudo apt-get install postgres82-dev

Configuring Postgres

Now we’ll configure postgres for our purposes. Creating a role with the same name as the user we’re running with makes everything a little easier:

sudo -u postgres createdb NAME_OF_YOUR_APP_HERE_production
sudo -u postgres createuser -P
Enter name of role to add: deploy
Enter password for new role: 
Enter it again: 
Shall the new role be a superuser? (y/n) n
Shall the new role be allowed to create databases? (y/n) y
Shall the new role be allowed to create more new roles? (y/n) n

after that you should be able to do execute psql NAME_OF_YOUR_APP_HERE_production as the deploy user and get right in.

Pound this.


One piece of the puzzle that didn’t quite make it into the RUMP moniker is pound, a handy reverse-DNS and load-balancer that fronts for our multiple mongrels. Install it thusly:


sudo apt-get install pound

sudo vi /etc/default/pound

setting startup=1 in there, and then:


sudo vi /etc/pound/pound.cfg

making it something like this:

## Minimal sample pound.cfg
##
## see pound(8) for details


######################################################################
## global options:

User            "www-data"
Group           "www-data"
#RootJail        /chroot/pound

## allow PUT and DELETE also (by default only GET, POST and HEAD)?:
#ExtendedHTTP    0

#WebDAV          0

## Logging: (goes to syslog by default)
##      0       no logging
##      1       normal
##      2       extended
##      3       Apache-style (common log format)
LogLevel        1

## check backend every X secs:
Alive           30

## use hardware-accelleration card supported by openssl(1):
#SSLEngine       &lt;hw&gt;


######################################################################
## listen, redirect and ... to:

## redirect all requests on port 8888 ("ListenHTTP") to the local webserver see "UrlGroup" below):
#ListenHTTP 127.0.0.1,8080

##
#UrlGroup ".*"
#BackEnd 127.0.0.1,80,1
#EndGroup

ListenHTTP
  Address 0.0.0.0
  Port    80
  Service
    BackEnd
      Address 127.0.0.1
      Port    8000
    End
    BackEnd
      Address 127.0.0.1
      Port    8001
    End
    BackEnd
      Address 127.0.0.1
      Port    8002
    End
    Session
      Type COOKIE
      TTL 900
      ID "_myappname_session_id"
    End
  End
End

That sets us up with pound listening on port 80, transferring the request to one of our three mongrel instances (see Mongrel section). Note the Session section, which may help keep things sorted out for some Rails session schemes.


Now start pound, like this:


sudo /etc/init.d/pound start

Try to connect to the site with a browser. you should get a 503 error, and something like this in /var/log/syslog:




Mar 15 23:51:31 ubuntu pound: backend 127.0.0.1:8000 connect: Connection refused

Mar 15 23:51:31 ubuntu pound: backend 127.0.0.1:8001 connect: Connection refused

Mar 15 23:51:31 ubuntu pound: backend 127.0.0.1:8002 connect: Connection refused

Mar 15 23:51:31 ubuntu pound: no back-end “GET / HTTP/1.1” from 123.123.123.123

Mar 15 23:51:31 ubuntu pound: no back-end “GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1” from 123.123.123.123

Subversion


If you want to run subversion on this server, here’s how to do it. If you are running subversion elsewhere and don’t want to move it, skip this section.


sudo apt-get install subversion xinetd

Create a user that will own the repositories:


sudo adduser —system —no-create-home —home /var/svn —group —disabled-login svn

Create the directory that will hold the repositories:


sudo mkdir /var/svn

sudo chown svn:svn /var/svn

Create file /etc/xinetd.d/svnserve with the following content, to autolaunch svn when it’s called upon:

service svn
{
       port = 3690
       socket_type = stream
       protocol = tcp
       wait = no
       user = svn
       server = /usr/bin/svnserve
       server_args = -i -r /var/svn
}

Restart xinetd so that svn will work

sudo /etc/init.d/xinetd restart

Create a test repository:

sudo -u svn svnadmin create /var/svn/testrepo

It should be possible to check out the repository and work on it:

svn co svn://localhost/testrepo

Assuming that worked, create the real repository for your project:

sudo -u svn svnadmin create /var/svn/myproject

Add a little security:

cd /var/svn/myproject/conf
sudo vi svnserve.conf

Set up like this:

    anon-access = none
    auth-access = write
    password-db = passwd

Create users for your remote username(s), and the local deploy user. This simplifies login for everyone, and makes it easier to spot changes that were committed from the production server! sudo vi passwd, making it look about like this:

    # create a user/pw or two
    joe_user = superseekrit
    deploy = soopersecret

Now try to check out, it should demand a valid username/password:

svn co svn://localhost/myproject

Assuming you have an existing repository you’d like to bring over, go to the old server and do this:

svnadmin dump /path/to/repos &gt; my_repos.dump
gzip my_repos.dump
scp my_repos.dump.gz deploy@my_ubuntu_host:/home/deploy

Then, on the new machine:

cd /home/deploy
gunzip my_repos.dump.gz
cd /var/svn
sudo -u svn svnadmin load myproject &lt; /home/deploy/my_repos.dump

Then make sure you can check it out:

cd /home/deploy
# delete the myproject directory if it's there, then:
svn co svn://localhost/myproject

Wrapping it up

Finally it’s time to install rails etc. I’ve installed them with rubygems:

curl -O http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/17190/rubygems-0.9.2.tgz
tar xzf rubygems-0.9.2.tgz ; cd rubygems-0.9.2
sudo ruby setup.rb
sudo gem update

sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies
sudo gem install postgres-pr
sudo gem install mongrel

(ignore warnings about not being able to compile fastthread stuff, it’s optional)

sudo gem install mongrel_cluster

If you’re using BackgroundRb, you’ll want these:

sudo gem install slave
sudo gem install daemons

Very soon we’ll have our app up and running. Create the database schema:

cd ~/myproject
rake db:schema:load

Configure a little mongrel cluster:

cd ~/myproject
mongrel_rails cluster::configure -p 8000 -N 3

As of this writing (May 2007), there’s a small bug that will bite you if you’re using both postgres and BackgroundRb. This is fixed in edge rails, but not yet in the released version. If you fall into this category, patch this file, as shown in <a href="http://dev.rubyonrails.org/attachment/ticket/7727/postgres_async_patch.diff">http://dev.rubyonrails.org/attachment/ticket/7727/postgres_async_patch.diff</a>:

sudo vi /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.15.2/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/postgresql_adapter.rb

Make sure you’re always running in production on this machine by putting the following line into your .bashrc:

export RAILS_ENV=production

If you’re using BackgroundRb, start the background processes:

cd ~/myproject
script/backgroundrb start

Tail log/backgroundrb.log to make sure it looks OK. Something like:

	20070316-13:56:35 (12680) Starting WorkerLogger
	20070316-13:56:35 (12681) In ResultsWorker
	...

At long last, start the mongrel cluster:

cd ~/myproject
mongrel_rails cluster::start

At this point you should be able to smack your RUMP on port 80 and watch it wiggle!

In no particular order, here are some of the sites where I found information to put this all together:

http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/PostgreSQL/

http://happycodr.com/blog/view/13-putting-a-ruby-on-rails-application-into-production

http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/docs/pound.html

http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man8/pound.8.html

http://kurup.org/blog/tag/pound

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edgy#How_to_install_Subversion_version_control_server_.28svnserve.29

http://blog.tupleshop.com/2006/7/8/deploying-rails-with-pound-in-front-of-mongrel-lighttpd-and-apache

That’s it, I guess. I hope this proves helpful to someone. Feel free to leave feedback in the comments below!

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