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These Instructions are now out of date, please read the remarks at the bottom of this wiki page for more information or see http://www.cpanel.net/docs/ror/index.html
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The development setup that I tested this under was a Virtuozzo VPS thats running Red Hat Enterprise 3, cPanel 10.2.0-R82, Apache 1.3.33.

These instructions shouldn’t be particular to Red Hat though because of cPanels “EasyApache” things go arwy when installing mod_fastcgi

These instructions assume you are running as a superuser.

Install Ruby:
(You can grab the latest source package from http://ruby-lang.org/en/20020102.html)

$ cd /usr/local/src
$ wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.4.tar.gz
$ tar -xvzf ruby-1.8.4.tar.gz
$ cd ruby-1.8.4
$ ./configure && make && make install

Next Ruby Gems:
(Latest version and localized mirrors here http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126 )

$ cd /usr/local/src
$ wget rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/11289/rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
$ tar -xvzf rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
$ cd rubygems-0.9.0
$ ruby setup.rb

Once Gems are installed its a whirl to install Rails:

$ gem install rails --include-dependencies

Now for FastCGI? and getting it to play nicely with Apache.

Install FastCGI?:
(‘Sourced’ from http://fastcgi.com/dist/)

$ cd /usr/local/src
$ wget fastcgi.com/dist/fcgi-2.4.0.tar.gz 
$ tar -xvzf fcgi-2.4.0.tar.gz
$ cd fcgi-2.4.0
$ ./configure && make && make install

And mod_fastcgi for Apache 1.3+
I installed modfastcgi as a DSO.
Because cPanel uses EasyApache the location of apxs is different so these instructions deviate somewhat from the INSTALL docs. (ymmv!)_

$ cd /usr/local/src
$ wget fastcgi.com/dist/mod_fastcgi-2.4.2.tar.gz
$ tar -xvzf mod_fastcgi-2.4.2.tar.gz
$ cd mod_fastcgi-2.4.2
$ /usr/local/apache/bin/apxs -o mod_fastcgi.so -c *.c
$ /usr/local/apache/bin/apxs -i -a -n fastcgi mod_fastcgi.so

Now for Ruby fcgi:
You could gem install fcgi but that currently installs version 0.8.5, so I’d reccomend compiling 0.8.6 from source as below. 0.8.6.1 is now in the gem repository.

$ gem install fcgi

You now need to edit your Apache config file.
By default its (/usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf)

Add these lines: (tweak the last line accordingly, comments are welcome)

LoadModule fastcgi_module libexec/mod_fastcgi.so

<IfModule mod_fastcgi.c>
    FastCgiIpcDir /tmp/fcgi_ipc/
    AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi
</IfModule>
FastCgiConfig -maxClassProcesses 20 -maxProcesses 20 -minProcesses 1 -processSlack 1 -initial-env RAILS_ENV=production -idle-timeout 120

Make sure /tmp/fcgi_ipc/ is writable and executable by Apache
(Apache runs as ‘nobody’ on my Machine, this may differ for you)

$ mkdir -p /tmp/fcgi_ipc
$ chown nobody.nobody /tmp/fcgi_ipc -R
$ chmod 755 /tmp/fcgi_ipc -R

Now restart Apache:

$ /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd restart

Ruby on Rails should now be successfully installed.

To use an existing application
- Make sure that your app lives in /home/USER/testapp
- Change the line in your Rails application’s public/dispatch.fcgi

Change:

require 'fcgi'

To:

require 'fcgi'
require 'rubygems'
require_gem 'fcgi'

Make sure Apache can find dispatch.fcgi
Now edit your app’s public/.htaccess and change/add the following lines to make sure that the Rails app is using FastCGI and that it knows that the app is living in a subdirectory.

Change:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.cgi?$1 [QSA,L]

To:

RewriteBase /testapp
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi?$1 [QSA,L]

Make sure that dispatch.fcgi is executable:

$ chmod 755 public/dispatch.fcgi

All should be installed! :)

For a new account, you can test RoR out by creating a test cPanel account and doing:

$ cd /home/USER
$ rails /home/USER/testapp
$ cd /home/USER/testapp/
$ ruby script/generate controller test
$ cd /home/USER/public_html
$ ln -s ../testapp/public rails

Replace USER with an appropriate username ;)

Then naviagte to http://www.yourtestdomain.com/rails/ and you should see a “Congratulations” page!

Note: This isn’t an ideal solution for hosting clients ruby apps, you should look toward a lighttpd mod_proxy solution for this.

Taken From: [link dead] http://blog.e-reet.org/archives/ruby-on-rails-on-cpanel

Comments:

There was a small mistake on the test that I fixed
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Is this out of date?
“Change the line in your Rails application’s public/dispatch.fcgi
Change:
require ‘fcgi’”
My install seems to have: require ‘fcgi_handler’ out of the box, no reference to just require ‘fcgi’. Anyone know?
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Just add the following lines in dispatch.fcgi after the fcgi_handler tag

require 'fcgi'
require 'rubygems'
require_gem 'fcgi'

Also, I have noticed that I was only able to get things going by adding this in httpd.conf instead of the lines mentioned above (in IfModule tag)

<IfModule mod_fastcgi.c>
FastCgiIpcDir /tmp/fcgi_ipc/
AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi
FastCgiWrapper On
FastCgiConfig -autoUpdate -singleThreshold 100 -killInterval 300 -idle-timeout 240
</IfModule>

Hope this helps.

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Adding those lines in httpd.conf on cpanel stopped apache starting. It starts ok with this format though:

LoadModule fastcgi_module ibexec/mod_fastcgi.so

After the other LoadModule entries.

FastCgiIpcDir /tmp/fcgi_ipc/
AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi

After the AddModule entries. The testapp example at http://www.mytestdomain.com/rails just gives me:

Bad Request
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.

I can save a “Hello World” script though and execute it at the command line:

test.rb

puts "Hello, World!"

#ruby test.rb
Hello, World!

So Ruby appears to be working – just not through the browser. Any ideas appreciated
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Problem:

Bad Request
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.

Solution:
in .htaccess, do NOT use:

RewriteBase /testapp
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi?$1 [QSA,L]

use just:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi?$1 [QSA,L]

If many are getting the same error, we should edit the tutorial above.

If I type in http://domain/rails/index.html i get the rails page

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Why not use /scripts/installruby to take care of the first couple of steps if you’re on a cPanel system?

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I’m running Apache 2.2,

Yeah, I did this:
Executed /scripts/installruby
gem install rails —include-dependencies

$ cd /home/USER
$ rails /home/USER/testapp
$ cd /home/USER/testapp/
$ ruby script/generate controller test
$ cd /home/USER/public_html
$ ln -s ../testapp/public rails

And everything works fine… it took 2 minutes… have I missed something? — rosslittle@gmail.com

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I couldn’t get anything working on my CPanel VPS until I changed the owner of the application.

chown -R user:user RAILS_APP