Many people have asked about Rails hosting on this site, but I'm not familiar enough with the back end of things to know if there's a difference.
I want to host some Ruby CGI 'webservices', basically just ruby methods that take parameters from a POST request, access a MySQL db and return data.
I've looked at RoR and it seems like overkill for this, from what I can tell it's for speeding up the development of data baesd CRUD sites, which is not at all what I'm doing.
So my question is, does this affect the hosting provider I choose? Does anyone recommend a good Ruby host for CGI operations? I'm not familiar with FastCGI, mod_ruby, Passenger, Mongrel etc. and what they mean for performance, scalability etc. I just want to host my ruby scripts with reasonably good performance, and all the info out there(and here) seems to be focused on rails.
First, if you want lightweight, Sinatra is usually my first pick. Pair it up with rack and Passenger for best results. It's not CGI, but realistically speaking, CGI is rarely a good match-up with Ruby.
Here's the "Hello World!" Sinatra app from the main page:
require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
get '/hi' do
"Hello World!"
end
Hard to get more lightweight than that.
As for providers, anybody that supports Passenger (mod_rack) should be able to handle Sinatra. I'm a big fan of Slicehost personally, but they're a VPS host, which means you need to be able to install and manage the entire stack yourself. If you don't mind paying a tiny bit extra for the infrastructure, Heroku makes installation and deployment dead simple, so long as your needs don't exceed what they provide (sounds like they won't). In the unlikely event that you're only using 5MB or if you're using an external storage mechanism like Amazon RDS, Heroku may actually be free for you.
Update:
Passenger is an Apache module that allows Rack applications to be run inside of Apache.
Rack is a middleware layer that separates the web server and the web framework from each other. This allows web frameworks to run on any web server for which there is an adapter.
Sinatra is a lightweight web framework that runs on top of Rack.
Once Passenger and Rack are installed (gem install rack, gem install passenger) you just need to edit the Apache vhost to point at the config.ru file for your Sinatra app and create the required directories as per the Passenger docs and you'll be good to go.
I think you might want to look into Rack. It allows you to do the kinds of things you're talking about and shrugs off the weight of frameworks like Rails or Merb. Rack applications can be hosted at a place like Heroku.
Related
While developing JavaScript apps, I usually create an API app, totally separate from the UI app. For the API, I usually use Sinatra.
I'm developing a JavaScript app that will use a WebSocket service I build. I'd like to use Ruby (em-websocket for now) and ActiveModel for data models. I want to keep this really lightweight, like a Sinatra app is for a RESTful API.
It seems my WebSocket service will simply be a ruby script invoked via "ruby web_socket_service.rb". I'd like to be able to use various gems (like activerecord, capistrano, and nokogiri) with this WebSocket service. What's the most typical way of accomplishing this?
Would I be better off creating a standalone gem to contain my models and the WebSocket service script and then host my WebSocket service from that? Or maybe simply include the gems and models directly in the script via "gem 'name'? Or, is there some special library or framework commonly-used to tackle this?
Look at a Rails app. That's the approach I would take if your WebSocket service starts to grow towards a medium-sized app. I.e. bin, lib, Rakefile, and a Gemfile for your gems and bundler.
For smaller apps you can still use a Gemfile and bundler to manage the included gems. This locks gem versions so you won't have conflicts if you deploy to other servers. And then just put everything into one or two script files, similar to Sinatra.
Creating standalone gems is really only useful for libraries or application parts that are reusable across many applications. This doesn't sound like that sort of thing.
I am very new to ruby and I wonder, Is it possible to have my ruby script deployed on a server?
Or I should have to use Rails?
As I can understood that Rails is not part of the core Ruby lang, and Ruby have server functionality even without Rails. (as in Java, PHP, etc..)
EDIT:
I have a Ruby script - acts as a cmd-line passed program - and I want to deploy it to an external (or even internal) server the way CGI scripts/programs used to do.
Yes, you can deploy any Ruby application, not just Rails apps obviously. Take a look at Capistrano.
Deployment and serving are two different things however. If you're looking for Ruby HTTP servers look at Unicorn, Thin, WEBrick, Puma.
If you want a fully-fledged solution try Heroku which handles both the deployment and web serving parts.
There are many tools to deploy Ruby projects, but you can do it pretty much manually.
I also found it very hard to find an easy-to-go solution and I think this is a very annoying gap in RoR framework.
I've been working in a solution to deploy a project to a server using Git, like the Heroku toolbelt (google it, is a really nice tool). The main concept is: you use Git to push your project and the server does everything else! Here you can see my project: https://github.com/sentient06/RDH/.
But please, don't focus on that. Instead, read the way I came to all information in the wiki: https://github.com/sentient06/RDH/wiki.
It is a bit outdated, but I can summarize here to you:
First, setup your server. This is the most boring part, you must setup all configuration, security measures, remote access, etc, etc.
If you don't have a server, you can hire one specially for RoR applications. There are a few good out there and each has a different deployment workflow. But supposing you decide o setup yourself:
I suggest you have any Linux or Unix system, server version. Then install Ruby Version Manager, then Ruby and then Rails. Then install a server application. I suggest Thin, but lots of people use Unicorn or Apache or other servers. Dig a little bit on the internet, find an easy to use solution. If you do not use Apache, though, you will need a "reverse proxy" too, so you can redirect all requests on ports 80, 8080, etc, to your applications. I suggest Nginx (I don't like Apache, I think is too overkill).
Now, everything done, the deploy process can be done more or less like this:
1 - Commit everything in a way your files are updated in the server;
2 - In the server, cd to the directory of your application and execute these commands:
$ bundle package
$ bundle install --deployment
$ RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate
$ rake assets:precompile
3 - Restart the server and, if necessary, the reverse proxy.
Dig on the internet to understand each command. These will pretty much force your application into production mode, reduce the space used by your javascript and CSS, migrate your production database and install the bundles. Production RoR is not so different from development RoR, it is just more compact and faster.
I do hope these informations are useful.
Good luck!
Update:
I forgot to mention, check ruby-toolbox, it has some really useful statistics and information on how often Rails technologies are being updated. They have many categories, this one is on deployment automation, give it a look: https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/deployment_automation.
Cheers!
After asking this question, I started using Sinatra as a way to serve web pages.
This evening, a friend of mine and I started to test the speed of the server.
The file to log in looks like:
require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
require 'haml'
enable :sessions #for cookies!
get '/' do
haml :index
end
And the index.haml looks like:
%title
First Page
%header
%h2 First Page
He's sitting on a recent laptop, as am I, with an Apple 802.11n router between the two of us. We're both running Windows 7. I've also tried these same files on a laptop running Ubuntu 9.10 x64 with Sinatra and all relevant files installed from apt-get.
Sinatra is taking 7 seconds to serve up a single page request, no matter the server OS, Windows or Linux. I see that here the author managed to get over 400 requests/second processed. What gives? (or should this be on SuperUser or the like?)
I'll set aside any opinions on when you should optimize your web application.
Set up different configurations in your Sinatra app for development and production because some of these suggestions, you won't always want to use. In fact, you should probably go ahead and setup and environment similar to how you would deploy in production. You would not deploy by simply running ruby app.rb. You'd want to put apache or nginx in front of your Mongrel. Mongrel will serve up your static files, but that's really only advisable for development mode. In deployment, a web server is going to do a lot better job for that. In short, your deployed environment will be faster than your standalone development environment.
At this point, I wouldn't worry about Mongrel vs. Thin. If Thin is twice as fast - it isn't - then your 7 seconds becomes 3.5. Will that be good enough?
Some things to try ...
I know I just told you to set up a deployment environment, but maybe it's not the server side. Have you tried running YSlow or PageSpeed on your pages? I/O is going to take up more of those 7 seconds (Disclaimer: I'm assuming that there's nothing wrong with your network set up) than the server. YSlow - Firebug actually - will tell you how long each part of your page takes to get to the browser.
One of the things that YSlow told me to do was to put a far forward Expires header on my static assets, which I knew but I was leaving optimization until the end. That's when I realized that there were at least 3 different places that I could specify that header. I'm convincing myself that doing it in nginx is the right place to put it.
If you're happy with those results, then you can look at the server. Off the top of my head, so not exhaustive
Turn on gzip responses.
Combine your stylesheets so there's only one per page request. There may be some Rack Middleware for this, if you don't do it manually.
Cache. I'm trying Rack::Cache.
Use sprites to decrease the number of image downloads you use.
Minify your Javascript. Again, maybe via Rack Middleware.
Rack Middleware is neat, but it uses CPU. So, manually minifying your Javascript adds a new step to your workflow, but on the server, it's faster than Middleware. It's a tradeoff.
Sorry if this was rambly.
I had this problem when running Sinatra with shotgun but not when running my app directly (i.e., ruby -rubygems app.rb). This is because shotgun forks and reloads the application for each request.
I found a thread in Sinatra's mailing list which discussed this issue and people there advised using rerun instead of shotgun. I'm happy to say it solved this issue for me.
Try using Thin as the server. I noticed an increase in performance compared with WEBrick and Mongrel.
gem install thin
When you run your app using ruby TestServer.rb you'll see the following:
Sinatra/0.10.1 has taken the stage on 4567 for development with backup from Thin
I'm running Sinatra inside VMWare Fusion with Vagrant. My app was running slowly (about ten seconds to service a request). Then I found this gem:
Webrick is very slow to respond. How to speed it up?
It seems that WEBrick was (by default) configured to reverse dns lookup on every request, and that was slowing it down.
If you use Webrick you can implement a servlet and service http requests using ruby. Now I have code that does everything that I want but I would like to move to Apache. Is there a way to modify the .htaccess file to send all the requests through a ruby handler?
you should check out phusion passenger. It lets you easily deploy any ruby Rack based web app in apache. You can then use rails, sinatra, waves, etc from apache.
You're asking for mod_ruby.
That was abandoned years ago in favor of running the Ruby code in a separate process under Mongrel, and just using Apache mod_proxy (or another web server acting as a proxy).
And now that Passenger is available lots of people (including myself) are adopting it instead of Mongrel, because it's simpler.
Just accept that you did it wrong the first time and bite the bullet. Rewrite your code as a Rack service, and run it via Passenger.
I know this is pretty exotic, but I want to deploy a Ruby web application (not Rails, but Rack based, so it plugs into most Ruby servers just fine) using JRuby. Google and friends give me a few success stories, but mostly rails related and if not, no details on the deployment are provided. The framework I'm using is Ramaze, if it matters.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
In my opinion, running a Rack based application with a rackup script is the real Ruby way. And I wanted to apply the same for JRuby too. That is why I've written jetty-rackup http://github.com/geekq/jetty-rackup
We are using it for deploying a Sinatra web application. No Java specific configuration needed. A typical, small config.ru is enough. Embedded jetty web server is used in place of Webrick then.
This is the "just works" gem for me: https://github.com/matadon/mizuno