Installing Phusion Passenger on Amazon Linux AMI 1.0

Once again, this is a progression of building out my Amazon Linux AMI, so the pre-requisites might be off, since I've previously installed a number of other things. And once again, this is simply a log of tasks for my own future reference, rather than a build recipe. Maybe this will be useful to someone else as well, so I've gone back and tagged all AMI articles with aws-linux-ami, so you can at least see the history of pre-requisites.

Anyway, this time I'm installing phusion passenger to host the ASP.NET app I ported to Rails last week. The AMI comes with Ruby 1.8.7. I next installed the following repos:

yum install libcurl-devel openssl-devel mysql-devel ruby-devel rubygems

Even tho gems is now installed, it's not current enough for rails, so first thing, upgrade gems

gem update --system

I also had rails fail to install, with

Installing ri documentation for rails-3.0.3...
File not found: lib

Which i fixed with rebuilding rdoc:

gem install rdoc-data
rdoc-data --install
gem rdoc --all --overwrite

Now it's finally time to install and build rails with mysql support (which is how i set my rails application up) and passenger

gem install mysql2
gem install rails
gem install passenger

Next, build the passenger apache2 module. I actually killed the install the first time around because libcurl-devel and openssl-devel were missing. The installer assured me that it would guide me through getting those dependencies resolved, but I wanted to make sure they came in through yum rather than have this installer download and build them from source. Anyway the command was:

passenger-install-apache2-module

This installed flawlessly and ended with instructions to put the following in my apache config:

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.2/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.2
PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby

A git diversion

Before getting to the apache setup of my rails app, I ran into this error trying to check the port out from my repo:

warning: remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, unable to checkout.

I don't know how this happened, since other gitosis repos i've created haven't had the same problem, but running

git push --all

on my development machine did the job. Apparently it had been pushing changes into the repo, but never set up a branch because that command reported:

\* [new branch]      master -> master

Well, fortunately after that all was good :)

Configuring rails in apache

Finally, the apache vhost config was exceedingly simple:

   <VirtualHost \*:80>
      ServerName www.yourhost.com
      DocumentRoot /somewhere/public    # <-- be sure to point to 'public'!
      <Directory /somewhere/public>
         AllowOverride all              # <-- relax Apache security settings
         Options -MultiViews            # <-- MultiViews must be turned off
      </Directory>
   </VirtualHost>

The important thing is that the DocumentRoot needs to point to the rails public directory not the root of the rails application.

The last task was running

rake db:create:all

to set up the expected db locally. After that, and an apache restart, the app came up without a hitch.

Of course, while setting all this up, I finally figured out why mod_mono was leaking semaphores, making all of this likely moot. But i'm glad to have this alternative while I determine whether the mod_mono behavior is really fixed.