In this blog I will list the steps needed to deploy a Rails 4 application on an Amazon EC2 server. The OS is Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS, the database is Postgresql and the web server is Unicorn + Ngnix. Previously I mainly deploy the project on Engine Yard. But this time I need to deploy it on a server manually.

Updating And Preparing The Operating System

Update the Operating System

Firstly we need to update our OS by running following command,

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sudo apt-get update

Change locale file

In some cases on my server it shows the following warnings,

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perl: warning: Setting locale failed.   
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:   
        LANGUAGE = "en_US:en",   
        LC_ALL = (unset),   
        LC_MESSAGES = "en_US.UTF-8",   
        LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"   
    are supported and installed on your system.

The solution is to edit the /etc/default/locale and add the following contents,

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LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Install the necessary packages

Next we need to install the following necessary packages by running,

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sudo apt-get install build-essential openssl libreadline6 libreadline6-dev zlib1g zlib1g-dev libssl-dev git-core python-software-properties nodejs libyaml-dev libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt-dev autoconf libc6-dev ncurses-dev automake libtool bison pkg-config

The python-software-properties allows us to easily manage your distribution and independent software vendor software sources. It will be useful when we install Postgresql and Nginx.

The nodejs is a Javascript runtime for Rails.

Install rbenv

Now we need to install a Ruby runtime. I choose rbenv instead of rvm, which is more lightweight for production.

Let’s install rbenv by running the following command,

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curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fesplugas/rbenv-installer/master/bin/rbenv-installer | bash

After installation, following its instructions, add the following content at the top of ~/.bash_profile

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export RBENV_ROOT="${HOME}/.rbenv"

if [ -d "${RBENV_ROOT}" ]; then
  export PATH="${RBENV_ROOT}/bin:${PATH}"
  eval "$(rbenv init -)"
fi

After that run source ~/.bash_profile to make the changed effective.

Now we install Ruby 2.1.2 and make it global by running following commands,

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rbenv install 2.1.2 --verbose
rbenv rehash
rbenv global 2.1.2

The install could take a while so grab a cup of coffee.

After Ruby 2.1.2 is installed, we can install bundler by typing,

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gem install bundler
rbenv rehash

Install Nginx

Now let’s install Nginx. Let’s add the repository of Nginx by typing following command,

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sudo apt-add-repository ppa:nginx/stable

Now we need to invoke sudo apt-get update again since we added a new software source.

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sudo apt-get update

Now let’s install Nginx by invoking,

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sudo apt-get install nginx

Let’s check Nginx status by typing

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sudo service nginx status

If it’s not running, we can start it by running following command,

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sudo service nginx start

Install Unicorn

Now we need to install unicorn if you haven’t done so.

Add gem 'unicorn' in your Gemfile and run bundle install.

And after that you can run unicorn_rails to start it. The default port of unicorn is 8080.

And then create unicorn config file config/unicorn.rb which has following contents,

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working_directory File.expand_path("../..", __FILE__)
worker_processes 5
listen "/tmp/unicorn.sock"
timeout 30
pid "/tmp/unicorn_xhoppe.pid"
stdout_path "/data/xhoppe/log/unicorn.log"
stderr_path "/data/xhoppe/log/unicorn.log"

Here we set worker_processes to 5, and in the server our application will be at /data/xhoppe. And the stdout_path and stderr_path are set to /data/xhoppe/log/unicorn.log.

Install Postgresql

Now let’s install Postgresql.

I want to install Postgresql 9.3 but the Postgresql version in default repository is 9.1. So we install Postgresql 9.3 by typing following commands, refer here

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sudo apt-get install wget ca-certificates
wget --quiet -O - https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.3 pgadmin3 libpq-dev

Now let’s create a Postgresql role, open psql by running sudo su -c psql postgres and type following commands,

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create role xhoppe with password 'xhoppe_secret';
alter role xhoppe createdb;
alter role xhoppe WITH LOGIN;

Nginx config file

And then update the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default file,

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upstream unicorn {
 server unix:/tmp/unicorn.sock fail_timeout=0;
}

server {
  listen 80 default_server;

  root /data/xhoppe/public;

  error_page 404 /data/xhoppe/public/404.html;
  error_page 500 502 503 504 /data/xhoppe/public/500.html;

  location / {
    try_files $uri/index.html $uri @unicorn;
  }

  location @unicorn {
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_redirect off;
    proxy_pass http://unicorn;
  }
}

The upstream unicorn matches the listen "/tmp/unicorn.sock" in config/unicorn.rb

After that, we need to run service nginx restart to restart nginx.

Clone project

Now we use git clone to clone our project in /data/xhoppe

First we define a /data/xhoppe/env.sh which defines some environments,

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XHOPPE_DATABASE_PASSWORD=secret
export XHOPPE_DATABASE_PASSWORD

SECRET_KEY_BASE=9a5a0316a...
export SECRET_KEY_BASE

The XHOPPE_DATABASE_PASSWORD is the production database’s password. And the SECRET_KEY_BASE is for rails session, which is generated by running rake secret.

After that we can run source env.sh to set these environment variables.

Running the project.

Now we can run the project by running

unicorn -c config/unicorn.rb -E production -D

Now we can access the website from our browser.