Ruby and Rails and MySQL and Apache and Passenger and Git: Install on CentOS 5

My New Years resolution was to learn ruby on rails, the popular web application framework. It just so happens I've been assigned a ruby project at work. Go figure..

I've been watching some screen-cast stuff my buddy at Pivotal lent me and the first thing to do was to install the stuff. Looks like it's pretty much dominated by people that develop on their Mac, then push apps to some public Rails hosting company. That's fine but I have a hankerin to install in my own CentOS 5 environment. It was actually a lot more tinkering than it should be, which is weird. So, I figured I'd better lay it out so I don't forget how it's done. Hopefully this'll help others. The latest version of ruby comes with ruby gems, the ruby package manager. So you don't need to install that separately.

Something that is interesting to note, Passenger is really mod_ruby - an apache module. They don't call it mod_ruby but that's what it is. Similar in theory to mod_perl and mod_php.



You'll get the latest stable ruby as of this writing (ruby-1.9.2-p136) + rails 3.0.3.

Another note, I'm using MySQL as my back end database but to do default 'bundle installs', you need sqlite so I'm installing that as well.

#

# Install deps
# Install the latest version of Ruby and Rails and Git to run in Apache + Passenger.
# Includes MySQL and sqlite.

yum -y install httpd zlib-devel curl-devel openssl-devel httpd-devel apr-devel apr-util-devel

wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org//pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.2-p136.tar.gz
tar -xvf ruby-1.9.2-p136.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.9.2-p136
./configure --enable-shared --enable-pthread
make && make install
cd ext/zlib
ruby extconf.rb --with-zlib-include=/usr/include --with-zlib-lib=/usr/lib64
cd ../..
make
make install
ruby --version

# Installing sqlite
wget http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-autoconf-3070400.tar.gz
tar -zxf sqlite-autoconf-3070400.tar.gz
cd sqlite-autoconf-3070400
./configure && make && make install


gem install rails
gem install passenger
gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-conf=/usr/bin/mysql --with-mysql-lib=/usr/lib64/mysql


wget http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.7.3.2.tar.bz2
tar xvf git*.*
cd git*
make prefix=/usr/local all
make prefix=/usr/local install


# run this by hand because you have to answer some questions.
# passenger-install-apache2-module

Next, you'll want to configure a hosting environment with a custom http config:


vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/rails_app.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.domain.com
    DocumentRoot /opt/rails/myapp/public
    <Directory /opt/rails/myapp/public>
        Allow from all
        Options -MultiViews
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>