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
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 come from a PHP and .NET world where I understand the environment fairly well. However I can't find a newbie explanation of how the Ruby / Ruby on Rails stack actually work with these web server.
Are they more close to the PHP model, where all classes of an application are loader for each request and there is no default shared memory, or is it like an application server where an active app sits in the memory and handles requests?
How is it with reloading when a file changes? Does the app in an application server has to be restarted? How does it know? Does it monitor file system?
I have seen that both the Ruby Version Manager (rvm) and the newer rbenv from 37signals shomewhat shuffles with the ruby command on OS X / Linux. This seems like a total magic to me. Does a webserver just runs ruby command and does not care where the interpreter is resolved in the $PATH?
Webrick is the default server of Rails and is usually used for developing and testing.
Rails is session based like PHP is. If you want to run in production you will generally use Phusion Passenger on Apache or Nginx, dont worry about that for now.
If you run in Development or Test environment you can edit your application files(views, controllers and models) and they will be reloaded on each request (even if they are not edited).
Have a look at generating a project and scafolds with Rails to get you started.
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
I want to write a web application and want to use Ruby. I have no knowledge of Ruby as of now and I want to write this app. to learn Ruby.
Is Ruby alone sufficient to write a web application or Rails need to be included?
You sound like you're interested in writing something in a barebones fashion.
For that then the Sinatra framework might be more approachable.
You could also use Heroku's service to make the deployment and hosting of your web application simple. I can't overstate how slick Heroku is - it's a masterclass in design and user experience!
The only thing you need to made a simplest web application with Ruby is rack. It's used by all Framework in Ruby. And all server like Passenger/Thin/unicorn/mongrel are rack compatible.
So you can put the must simplest ruby web application like that :
class HelloWorld
def call(env)
[200, {"Content-Type" => "text/plain"}, ["Hello world!"]]
end
end
But the dynamic system are more difficult. So a framework is really helpful.
Yes, you can, depending on your development environment. The most common approach that doesn't use any framework, such as Rails, is to use Apache with modruby/eruby. See http://www.modruby.net/en/ for more information (also wikipedias eruby entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ERuby)
And, technically speaking, Rails is just a framework written in Ruby, so it's technically still "just ruby" :)
Here is a list of other frameworks than Rails.
You might want to start with Sinatra : it's really small and lets you focus more on the Ruby-learning than on the framework-learning.
Ruby is sufficient but you would have to wire the http server (like webrick/apache/mongrel) with the application you are writing by yourself.
I'd recommend, as to avoid this wireing, to use a simple basic framework like sinatrarb http://www.sinatrarb.com/
Ruby is sufficient, but I wouldn't recommend it. I would recommend working with a framework until you're comfortable with Ruby.
You may want to start even smaller though.
I would definitely use Rails if I were you. Although you can build a website using only Ruby, it's a bit overkill, and you sure can get a lot more using Rails.
A great start for learning Rails (that's where I started) is:
http://headfirstlabs.com/books/hfrails/
There's a few chapters in there you can read. It's really good, and will give you a nice and solid introduction.
Edit
Also, you can use Mongrel, Webrick, lighttpd, Apache etc with it with no problems
You can start off by checking out Chapter 18 (and the rest) of the "Pickaxe Book" titled Ruby and the Web. You can find the online version here to see the nitty gritty of writing Ruby only scripts for a website. There are many options to choose from, most of which have been already suggested here, that will get your website running much quicker and easier.
I've got a non-RoR but ruby webapp in the works.
So far, I've just been using requests, hacks, and mod_ruby; but I'd really like to try out Mongrel--which seems to work really well for RoR sites.
I looked at the examples given in GitHub, and none of them does dynamic changing of content w/o having to restart Mongrel like you can do in RoR under dev mode.
How can I do this? (Just using load doesn't work.)
I use Sinatra with a Mongrel backend; hello world really is as easy as it says on the front page. I actually started with Sinatra, and then changed the server from webrick to mongrel after experimenting around with which gave better performance.
See this question for how that testing worked out.
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.