Sometimes the current options for paid hosting of Rails apps are just not warranted for small scale apps. Imagine a small business app where there may only be 10 or 15 users across the whole country. These are small, but very real CRUD apps that need to be accessed from a web browser by remote users, it’s just that the user count may be small. Let’s face it, not every site in the world gets a million hits a second, right?  Sometimes the cost of paid hosting options is too much for these little apps, which can cost $50 to $75 a month even for the smallest hosting package. For big corporations this is no big deal, but for small mom-and-pop companies or small organizations, it’s still too much.

So, being a simple and frugal guy, I have been able to successfully host a few of these small, private login apps right in an Ubuntu Linux virtual machine that I am running inside of a Windows XP box sitting right on my local network.

Yep… A Windows XP machine running Virtual Box which has Ubuntu 10, where I used RVM to install Rails and all the Gems for the app. Then I go to a terminal window and start up the Rails development web server on a certain port, and leave it running. In most cases, the database is SQLite, but you can use anything that you can get running in your development environment. SQLite is plenty powerful enough for this small user-count scenario, even if the database is or becomes large (1GB, 5GB is no problem for SQLite). 

Most of my apps do user authentication to validate the users at login. Myself or an admin for the app are the only ones who can create user accounts . The total number of daily users is usually less than 20 or so, and it is not open to public signup. It’s a low volume, privately accessed app.  So, the developer environment of a simple Ubuntu / Rails machine handles it very well. The users have no idea what is happening on the back end.

I have the XP machine on a battery backup, and I have a static public IP with my business-grade internet service provider.

To handle the hits, I redirect from my main public facing router (switch) to the LAN based IP and port which the Ubuntu VM uses.

So, my users enter an address like this to hit their app (notice that a specific port is requested):

http://210.123.034.104:1234     

(the above is a fake address, but you get the picture)

When this hits my public facing router, I redirect  it to the Ubuntu Virtual Machine LAN IP and the port that I used when I started the Rails development server:

192.168.0.125:3003

So, with this mapping in place, I go to the virtual machine and open up a terminal, CD to the Rails app directory, and enter:

rails s –p 3003

to start up the server on port 3003. (You can use any free port that you have available.)

Boom! A live self-hosted Rails app. 

You can run as many of these as you want. Even in the same VM you can run different ones just by change the port that is used for the Rails server, and then just create a new mapping on your switch.

Sure, since I am using SQLite, it’s single threaded hits to the database file, but hey, for what little traffic this thing gets each hour, it handles it very easily, and the users never feel any speed issues.

Pros: Free, full control, hands-on, dang… it just works! Trust me, I’ve been doing it for months!!!

More Pros: Because it’s a VM , about 20GB is enough size, and you can backup or clone the entire machine as a single file.

Cons: Keeping the host XP machine and the VM alive all the time, keeping my internet connection alive, keeping the Ubuntu updates applied (if needed), backing up the data file(s).

I recently set up a new Ubuntu 12.04 machine in a VirtualBox VM. After installing the basic RVM, Rails, and Ruby stuff, I was then ready to install RubyMine. (By the way, see this post where I explain how to setup the Rails goodness on a new Ubuntu 12.04 machine: http://mattslay.com/installing-rails-on-ubuntu-12-04-with-rvm-support/ )

Installing RubyMine

There is no actual “installer” for RubyMine on Linux. You just extract it to a folder of your choice. (I put mine in /home/matt/apps/RunyMine-4.0.3/). If you try to place it in one of the more locked-down system folder, you could run into permissions problems, which always drives me nuts. So I just create and “apps” folder in my Home folder, and drop all my non-Ubuntu-Software-Center packages in separate folders there.

You can read the RubyMine Installation Instructions in the file named “Install-Linux-tar.txt” file which is located in the archive file for RubyMine that you will download from JetBrains. (http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/download/).  It will tell you where to unzip the files, and how to launch RubyMine after you’ve extracted it from the archive. (Note to Windows users… All this talk about “tar” and “archive” is basically what us Windows folks call a “zip” file.) After you download the archive from the JetBrains site, right click on it and open it with the Archive Manager. From there you can extract it to a folder of your choice. After that, it’s ready to run RubyMine (well, after you follow the next step…)

Sun Java JDK

RubyMine requires the Sun Java JDK environment to make its fancy GUI stuff work (note: RubyMine does not work well with OpenJDK, so don’t use this one by mistake!). Unfortunately, the Ubuntu Software Center does not have a click-easy installer for this, so you’ve got to do it in a terminal window, but trust me, it’s not hard. I followed this guide (from a Question/Answer on StackOverflow) to install the Sun Java JDK 1.7.0 in my new Ubuntu machine:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10178601/rubymine-on-linux

Note: This step can be done before or after you extract RubyMine from the .tar download. It’s just that RubyMine will give you an error if you try to run it without having the Sun Java JDK installed.

Done!

With Rails and Ruby installed (see link at the top of this page) and RubyMine extracted, and Sun Java JDK installed, you are ready to ride on the Rails train.

Update 2013-03-18: These instructions also worked well on a Linux Mint 14 box (which is based on Ubuntu 12.10)

I just setup a fresh VM with Ubuntu 12.04, and I wanted to setup Ruby on Rails on the machine right off the bat.

I followed this “Installing Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu 12.04” guide from The Tech Journal, which worked very well, except I had to make a couple of changes in the instructions, which you can see in my notes below:

Again, here’s the guide I followed :

http://www.the-tech-tutorial.com/?p=1868

Better way of installing RVM:

I had a little trouble installing RVM per the instructions in the above post, so, I followed the basic install instructions directly from the full RVM site:

https://rvm.io/rvm/install/

Install RVM/Ruby dependencies:

Next, from the terminal window, type:

rvm requirements

RVM will show you a list of dependencies that need to be installed. So, run the sudo apt-get commands shown (copy and paste them in the terminal window) to prepare the environment for rvm, ruby, rails development.

Install a version of Ruby:

rvm install <ruby_version>

I can’t tell you which version(s) you’ll want or need, but this how you will install them.
You can get a list of available versions with this command:

rvm list known

 

You’re on you on from here…

Create a GemSet, then install Rails and any other gems your app needs. You’ll probably use the “bundle” command to pull in the required gems from a gemfile. From here on, it’s basic Rails stuff.

Other crap I’ve had to deal with if something goes wrong….

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9056008/installed-ruby-1-9-3-with-rvm-but-command-line-doesnt-show-ruby-v/9056395#9056395

Oh, yeah, one more final point about (not) installing gem docs…

I always like to turn off the documentation downloads (rdoc and ri) when installing new gems (I never read the docs locally this way, I always use the web). You can make a permanent change on your system to *not* install gem documentation when installing new gems. Run this line in the terminal window:

echo "gem: --no-rdoc --no-ri" > ~/.gemrc

This will create a .gemrc file in your home folder telling the gem installer not to download the docs when you install new gems. You only need to do this once.

Do this before you run any “gem install” commands, or use Bundler, so that it won’t waste time and space pulling down docs for the gems.

Other detailed instructions for installing a full Ruby, Rails, Apache, MySql stack

If you really want a LOOONG tutorial that also gets deep into installing Apahce, MySql, and all that jazz, check out this post which has a 35 page PDF mega walk-through.

Setting up RubyMine

If you want to install RubyMine IDE for your Rails development, you can follow my instructions here: http://mattslay.com/installing-rubymine-4-on-ubuntu-12-04/

Other goodies I installed on my new Ubuntu machine:

I installed these personal favorites right from the Ubuntu Software Center  (I’ve listed links so you can learn more about these tools, but I recommend installing them through the Ubuntu Software Center right inside of Ubuntu):

• Krusader (A better File manager than the standard Ubuntu one)
  http://www.krusader.org/
• Konsole (A better Console/Terminal window that then the standard Ubuntu one)
  http://kde.org/applications/system/konsole/
• Tortoise HG Workbench (for Mercurial version control) (install via PPA to get latest version):
  https://launchpad.net/~tortoisehg-ppa/+archive/releases
  Note: Read the notes at the top of the page to install the PPA key for apt to work properly.
  Also note that they recommend not installing Mercurial ahead of time. Let the TortoiseHG PPA handle that for you.
• gitg – Git repository browser/GUI
• KDiff3
• XRDP – Remote Desktop Server: Access your new Ubuntu machine from Windows via Remote Desktop
  http://www.xdrp.org
• DropBox
• LuckyBackup – To create/schedule backups.
  https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/luckybackup
  LuckyBackup tutorial here:
  http://www.liberiangeek.net/2011/02/schedule-backup-luckybackup-ubuntu-10-10-maverick-meerkat/

 

 

If you’ve got favorite Linux/Ubuntu tools that you think are helpful to Rails developers, please add them in the comments.

Here is the text displayed from running the configuration command line for the Devise authentication gem in rails.

Running this command:

rails generate devise:install

Generates this text:

Some setup you must do manually if you haven’t yet:

1. Ensure you have defined default url options in your environments files. Here
is an example of default_url_options appropriate for a development environment
in config/environments/development.rb:

config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { :host => ‘localhost:3000′ }

In production, :host should be set to the actual host of your application.

2. Ensure you have defined root_url to *something* in your config/routes.rb.
For example:

root :to => “home#index”

3. Ensure you have flash messages in app/views/layouts/application.html.erb.
For example:

<p class=”notice”><%= notice %></p>
<p class=”alert”><%= alert %></p>

4. If you are deploying Rails 3.1 on Heroku, you may want to set:

config.assets.initialize_on_precompile = false

On config/application.rb forcing your application to not access the DB
or load models when precompiling your assets.

I received this e-mail today (2011-01-27) about the end of Ruby on Rails support in NetBeans…

Here’s a link to the announcement on their website: 

http://netbeans.org/community/news/show/1507.html

This doesn’t surprise me at all, and I’m glad I switched to RubyMine a few months ago! I’ve noticed the Ruby/Rails forums on the NetBeans have been really dead for a while now, and I had already seen the in-house development going down hill.

So, here is the e-mail I received:

From: [===== (Update: 2011-01-27) I blanked out his part to protect the sender, at their request =======]
Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2011 4:39 AM
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: Important Message: Ruby on Rails Support Discontinued in NetBeans IDE

Dear NetBeans Community:

After thorough consideration, we have taken the difficult step to discontinue support for Ruby on Rails in the NetBeans IDE. Two main issues underpin this decision:

Java SE 7 and Java Development Kit 7 (JDK 7) are the next major releases of the Java SE platform, which Oracle is committed to deliver in 2011. A key objective of the NetBeans IDE has always been to offer superior support for the Java platform. To maintain that objective and capitalize on the JDK 7 release themes–multi-language support, developer productivity and performance–it is necessary that our engineering resources are committed to a timely and quality release of NetBeans IDE 7.0.

Second: Although our Ruby support has historically been well received, based on existing low usage trends we are unable to justify the continued allocation of resources to support the feature.

As of January 27, the Ruby on Rails module will be gone from development builds of NetBeans IDE 7.0. Developers who want to continue to use Ruby on Rails functionality in the NetBeans IDE should please visit the NetBeans Ruby Support page for details on how to do so going forward.

We remain committed to delivering a first-class product to our community of developers and users, and we encourage your feedback on our mailing lists and forums, on Twitter, or by writing to us.

Thank you for your continued support of NetBeans. 
The NetBeans Team

There’s a new way to Install Ruby and Rails on a Windows Machine

I wanted to make a small post to point you curious Windows developers over to the new Rails Installer for Windows web site (approx January 18, 2011), which was recently put online by Engine Yard, and is headed up by Wayne Seguin, the author of the popular RVM gem. The site shows three simple steps that will have your Windows box up and running with Ruby and Rails in just a few clicks. There is even a brief 3-minute video showing you just how simple it is to follow the steps and generate your first Rails 3 app in just minutes.

Next, you need an editor…

I think what the did is great; however… I think the stopped one step too soon. They get Ruby and Rails installed on your Windows machine, and show you how to generate your first app, but they stop short of showing you how to edit the Ruby and Rails source code files to actually finish building an app. Most hard core Rails devs are Linux or Mac users, and they eat, breathe, and sleep in a terminal window or some other (weird) text editor to do the actual coding. By now in my coding career, I know that every dev has his or her own favorite editor, and that’s fine; I have my own favorites too.  You could go really hard-code on the Windows platform and use Notepad plus an Explorer window. However, I think that if a new Rails on Windows users does jump on board, they will come out better choosing one the available code editors or IDEs to make their coding experience better.

You can gain a lot of insight about a Rails app just by seeing a visual of the folder structure that you get in a generated rails app. That’s the first thing you need to get your brain around as you start studying Rails. From the folder structure, you will edit the code for various Rails resources (i.e. the Models, the Views, and the Controllers), as well as a handful of config files for a Rails app.

You should check out each of these to see which one you like best: Ruby Mine IDE, RedCar, NetBeans, Komodo IDE, E editor(similar to TextMate)

So, finally, here’s a screen shot of the folder structure for a basic Rails app. (What you see here is in my RubyMine IDE). Those 3 red arrows point to the main folders for Models, Views, and Controllers. You’ll spend a lot of your time working on files in these folders. Also, notice that these folders are subfolders of a folder named “app”. 

So, be prepared to study the various Rails IDE or editors. My personal favorite is RubyMine.

So, check out the Rails Installer for Windows at http://railsinstaller.org/ to start your journey on the Rails path to coding goodness.

User *authentication* is looking them up in the Users database to ensure they have an account in your system.

User *authorization* is a system of determining what areas of your app the User can access once they are authenticated into the site. 

Article 2: Devise and CanCan – Restful Resources for Administrators

I wanted find out for myself what the reported HAML goodness is all about, so I spent a little time to educate myself on the basics, and then I took to converting one of my Rails erb files over to HAML. I’m posting the before and after results here as HAML examples to give one more convincing example of how much easier it is to read and write HAML views than the more noisy erb you-must-close-every-tag format.
At the end of this article, I list a few links to resources I found useful as I was getting started with HAML in my Rails application development.

Before (erb):

<div class="page-heading">
 <h1>Quote: <%= @quote.formatted_id ></h1>
</div>

<= render 'form' >

<div id="tabs">
 <ul>
  <li><a href="#devices-tab">Devices</a></li>
  <li><a href="#options-tab">System Options</a></li>
  <li><a href="#reports-tab">Reports</a></li>
  <li><a href="#notes-tab">Notes</a></li>
 </ul>
</div>

<div id="devices-tab"> Devices Page</div>

<div id="options-tab"> Options Page</div>

<div id="reports-tab"> Reports Page</div>

<div id="notes-tab"> Notes Page</div>

<script type="text/javascript">
 $(document).ready(function() {
 $( "#tabs" ).tabs();
 });
</script>

After (HAML):

.page-heading
  %h1 Quote #{@quote.formatted_id}

= render 'form'

#tabs
  %ul
    %li
      %a{:href => "#devices-tab"}Devices
    %li
     %a{:href => "#options-tab"}System Options
    %li
      %a{:href => "#reports-tab"}Reports
    %li
      %a{:href => "#notes-tab"}Notes

#devices-tab
  Devices Page

#options-tab
  Options Page

#reports-tab
  Reports Page

#notes-tab
  Notes Page

:javascript
  $(document).ready(function() {
  $( "#tabs" ).tabs();
  });

More HAML examples and links

Some Thoughts on HAML by Rob Conery

Daniel Fischer says HAML is beautiful poetry

This article by Eric Davis exposes why he thinks HAML is bad, so you may want to study what he has to say

HAML cheat sheet

another HAML Cheat Sheet on http://cheat.errtheblog.com

HAML questions on StackOverflow

HAML user group on Google

http://www.rubyinside.com/haml-a-new-view-template-language-for-rails-235.html

http://haml-lang.com/

Learn more about HAML on Wikipedia

Latest HAML links on Coder I/O

Use this tool to automatically convert erb and html to HAML

HAML Videos

A video on HAML by Jason McCay from BarCamp Birmingham 2008-04-12

A HAML video from John Schult at merb day Atlanta 2008-12-06

HAML and SASS video (2007-11-20) – http://www.podcast.tv/video-episodes/episode-038-haml-and-sass-in-15-minutes-5214343.html

HAML and SASS video on Doctype video podcast Episode 38

I am proud to report that I have successfully installed and used the Devise authentication gem in my little test app that I am building learn Rails. I’m still a newbie at all this stuff, so anything that I can “gem install” and then hack my way through configuring and actually see the thing work in my app always brings a smile to my face. The Introducing Devise (#209) and Customizing Devise (#210) screencasts on RailsCasts.com really helped me a lot by showing how simple it is to set it up and do some customization. Plus, the documentation for basic configuration and use is pretty easy to follow. That’s always a good thing to see in these gems. Since I’m still playing around on Rails 2.3.5, I had to use version 1.0.7 of Devise, but they do have a Rails 3 version on the download page too, so be sure you use the right version.

With Devise in place in your app (it only requires a few lines to configure it, see the documentation on the web site for how to set it up), not only can you handle all the basic needs of authenticating a user login from your Users table (without writing as single line of code!), it also gives you built-in functions to create new user accounts, emailing them their forgotten password, and letting them change their password while logged in.  Beyond those basics, you can then easily restrict access to certain parts of your app to only those users of a certain role. You simply create a Model for each role that you want to work with in your app.

I originally found some code samples for a roll-your-own authentication approach on the Building a New Web Site with Rails blog post over at a ThinkingInRails.com, and it did show me how to approach this if I wanted to have and maintain my own code base for this matter, but I really wanted to use a ready-made solution for this so I could move on to other matters in my Rails learning.
So, at this point, I must say that I’m going with the Devise gem for authentication in my Rails apps (like I have a lot of Rails apps, but hey, this thing is a great way to go when that does happen).

Other Devise resources:

• Railscasts episode #209 Introducing Devise
• Railscasts episode #210 Customizing Devise
• Blog post by authors at <plataformatec/> introducing Devise
• There is a fairly active Devise discussion group over on Google Groups.
• Devise ver 1.0.07 Readme (for Rails 2.3.5)
• Devise ver 1.1.rc1 Readme (for Rails 3 Beta 4)
• Blog post: Comparison of various Rails authentication solutions
• Rails authentication solutions discussed on Stack Overflow
• Article 1: Getting Started with Devise and CanCan The article includes very detailed steps and code samples for both Devise and CanCan.
• Article 2: Devise and CanCan – Restful Resources for Administrators

May 26, 2010 – Last night I attended my first ever Ruby users group meeting. It’s a meeting of the RubyHam Yahoo group for us folks here in Birmingham, Alabama. There were about 15 people there, and four short presentations on various Ruby and Rails topics, most of which were over my head at this point in my Ruby walk.

I began my study of Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework in early April 2010. With my long FoxPro background (1992) and some .Net (2008), I’ve pretty much been a Microsoft man for a long time, so I’m not really sure what drew me to study Ruby and the Rails framework in the first place. I guess I’m just an easy sell on coding tools that sound cool. I knew the basics of the MVC pattern from my recent study of ASP.Net MVC, so I kind of knew what to expect, since Rails is an MVC framework too.

Mac, Windows, Linux? – At work I’m a Microsoft guy, but at home in the evenings I dance on the Apple floor (since about 2006) with my beautiful white iMac 20”. Since all of this was going to be new to me anyway, I decided to go the route that was the most foreign to me so I could really learn a lot of new things from this venture… So, I decided to setup that unsuspecting Mac to explore this dark new world.

Terminal Window vs. IDE…

I am an IDE guy, and not a terminal window guy, so I started out by installing the NetBeans 6.8 IDE (free, and it runs on Linux, Windows, and OSX). There are several choices when it comes to Ruby IDEs: RadRails from Aptana (free), Ruby In Steel (not free), RubyMine (not free), and many more. You can read this blog post to learn the pros and cons of some of these (and perhaps find a few more choices down in the blog comments). You’ll want to study them all to see which one you like best. Note: Ruby/Rails doesn’t require an IDE… you can do it all from the command line, but surely you’ll want a good IDE of some sort.

Database Choices…

The Rails framework (that is: the generated app it creates) defaults to work with the SQLite database thingy, which I knew little about, other than its simple life as an embedded database, which is a cool thing for sure. But I wanted to go with a more complex stack using MySql just because it seemed like a more big-boy thing to do. So I downloaded, installed, and configured MySql (for the first time ever, since I’ve always used Microsoft SQL Server) and now some of those mysteries about MySQL are now cleared up for me as well.

Now, I’m still a relative newbie on Mac stuff that takes me to that scary Terminal window, and man, it took some work to get my machine all gem’d up and ready for Ruby / Rails / MySql development, but I somehow stumbled through it all by surfing around for instructions. I’m still not exactly sure what all those ‘sudo’ commands did, but hey, it now works.

On Max OSX, Ruby is already installed with the OS, but I still had to get the rest of the bits in place. I may have installed a few things along the way that were already in present, but it seemed to work out fine.

First Rails app…

So there I was… Ruby, RubyGems, Rails, MySql, NetBeans 6.8. Ready to rock!

NetBeans has a New Project wizard for Ruby on Rails apps, so I fired that off to create my first ever Ruby on Rails app. The Project Wizard guides you through choosing your project name and location, Ruby version, database choice, web server, and Rails version. After the project is generated, if you decide to change which databases engine you’d like to use, you just edit the database.yml config file in the projects /Configuration folder to tell it which database adapter to use.

(I later setup and tested SQLite and it was cool to get that working too. Seems like I had to install some Ruby SQLite gems in the environment to get it set up.)

So the whole install/configure thing was surrounded with several mysterious activities to get everything in the environment setup properly, but I did it. I can’t express the feeling of success I had after spending a couple of hours hacking away at my machine to install all this stuff, much of which I didn’t understand at the time.

By “success” I simply mean that I can now:

• start MySql server (I have not set it up to automatically start up yet. I don’t want it running all the time)
• launch the NetBeans IDE and create a new Ruby on Rails project
• ‘script/generate scaffold’  – code generates a model, the views, and the controller (from the IDE, mind you, not that crazy command line)
• ‘migrate’ that model schema to the database (again, from the NetBeans IDE)
• and finally, hit the Run button to watch the web server start up and take me to the default generated landing page for my app.

That wasn’t so bad..

Hearing all those smart guys talking in the room last night, I’d say I’ve got a LOT to learn from here, but I guess they all started where I am today, or even where I was back April wondering what this Ruby thing is all about.

You can do it too…

Now it’s your turn to give Rails a test drive. Configuring the environment is different on every OS platform, so depending on what OS you’re running (Mac OSX, Windows, or Linux) you’ll just have to surf around and find the instructions.

Here is a link to basic Ruby installation instructions for each OS. Then, you’ll still have to do some more work to install the Ruby on Rails framework.

Here’s is her set of instructions you can follow which guide you through installing Ruby, Ruby Gems, and Ruby on Rails.

Sadly, like many resources on the internet, the setup information is scattered all about. Many instructions assume you already know certain things about the platform. And there are different versions of everything… Ruby has a version, Rails has a versions, gems have versions. Heck, the gem installer even has versions. Oh yeah, and what is a gem in the first place? (You’ll find out soon enough once you get started.) I swear, it seems like more than you can keep straight at first. Oh, wait, but there’s RVM (Ruby Version Manager, I think). What the heck is that all about? Maybe I’ll find out if I keep digging.

Resources to help *YOU* get started

You can Google “Ruby on Rails” and get more info than you can shake a stick at, but below I’ll list out some resources that were helpful to get me started (I’ll add more to the list when I can go back and find them). There are podcasts, videos, and blogs galore.

RailsTutourial.org (Check out the online Book link at the top of the page)

http://www.sitepoint.com/books/rails2/samplechapters.php (free book chapters in PDF, including setup for each OS)

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ (good getting started info from the mail Rails site)

http://www.ruby-forum.com/ (very active user forum)

http://railscasts.com/ (videos. very good videos!)

youtube videos (more videos)

http://5by5.tv/rubyshow ( a good podcast)

http://www.buildingwebapps.com/learningrails (audio lessons and video screencasts)

RubyFlow.com Daily Ruby/Rails links added my community members

How to install Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3 in Ubunto 10.10

See more resource links here: Resources for getting started with Ruby on Rails