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Assumptions and Requirements

Firstly I'm assuming your starting point is a bare install of Ubuntu Server. Don't select the LAMP option (although it might not hurt - I haven't tested it) as the following procedure will install everything you need. Secondly, I'm assuming you have more than one public IP available to your server. If you don't, you will need to run Lighty on a different port and proxy all your Rails sites through from Apache, as described in part 3 of this article, and also in more depth in this article.

Our finishing point is a multi-homed server with Lighty on one IP for Rails, Apache2 on another IP for Apache2/PHP sites, and MySQL and PostgreSQL support in Rails and PHP. I'm not covering things like Subversion and Capistrano here - that's a whole different can of worms. For a good tutorial on deploying onto Lighty using Capistrano, I highly recommend this article.

Part 1: Initial Setup and Package Installation

Pretty much everything that follows requires root priveleges, so to save your fingers some work, acquire a root shell:

james@ubuntu:~$ sudo -i
Password:
root@ubuntu:~#

To kick off, enable the Universe repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list - this is required for some packages such as irb. Then bring your server up to date and install build-essential, to allow building of mysql and postgres gems later:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install build-essential

Next edit /etc/network/interfaces to configure your server with 2 IPs; this article will use 192.168.10.3 for Apache2 and 192.168.10.4 for Lighty. Obviously you should substitute your real, public IPs. Note the auto lines to ensure the interfaces come up on reboot:

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
        address 192.168.10.3
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        network 192.168.10.0
        gateway 192.168.10.1

auto eth0:1
iface eth0:1 inet static
        address 192.168.10.4
        netmask 255.255.255.0

Now install Ruby:

apt-get install ruby1.8 ruby1.8-dev irb1.8 rdoc1.8

create symlinks:

ln -s /usr/bin/ruby1.8 /usr/bin/ruby
ln -s /usr/bin/irb1.8 /usr/bin/irb

Install RubyGems:

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/11289/rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
tar -xzf rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
cd rubygems-0.9.0
ruby setup.rb

Install Rails:

gem install rails --include-dependencies

Install PostgreSQL and postgres gem (ignore compilation errors):

apt-get install postgresql-8.1 postgresql-server-dev-8.1 libpgsql-ruby1.8
gem install postgres

Install MySQL and mysql gem (choose option 2):

apt-get install mysql-server libmysqlclient15-dev libmysql-ruby1.8
gem install mysql

Install fcgi gem (needed to use Rails with Lighty):

apt-get install libfcgi-dev libfcgi-ruby1.8
gem install fcgi

Make sure ruby is happy with everything installed:

root@ubuntu:~/rubygems-0.9.0# irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'fcgi'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> require 'mysql'
=> true
irb(main):003:0> require 'postgres'
=> true

Install web servers:

apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysqli php5-pgsql php5-gd
apt-get install lighttpd

Phew - that's it for package installation.

Part 2: Configuration

First set up your databases - I won't cover how to do that here. Next set up your Apache2 sites - by default Apache2 will greedily bind to all available interfaces, so you will need to edit the configuration to restrict it to only one IP, leaving the other free for Lighty. This is done by editing the /etc/apache2/ports.conf file to look something like this:

Listen 192.168.10.3:80

Then create your Apache2 virtual host configurations. In Ubuntu, vhosts live in /etc/apache2/sites-available and are activated using the command "a2ensite". In this example, I'm creating a site for example.com by creating the file /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com as follows:

<VirtualHost 192.168.10.3:80>
  ServerName www.example.com
  ServerAlias example.com
  DocumentRoot /home/web/example.com/public_html
  Alias /webstat /home/web/example.com/stats
  CustomLog    /home/web/example.com/logs/access.log combined
  ErrorLog     /home/web/example.com/logs/error.log
</VirtualHost>

Note that the VirtualHost declaration uses the IP explicitly. In order for this to work, you must also edit the file /etc/apache2/sites-available/default which contains the NameVirtualHost directive, so that the first 2 lines read as follows:

NameVirtualHost 192.168.10.3:80
<VirtualHost 192.168.10.3:80>

Then activate your site and restart Apache2:

a2ensite example.com
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Netstat should now show Apache2 listening only on the desired IP:

root@ubuntu:/# netstat -ltnp | grep apache2
tcp        0      0 192.168.10.3:80         0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN     7187/apache2

Now its time to set up your Rails sites using Lighty. Here is a sample /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf file for a couple of Rails sites, rails1.example.com and rails2.example.com. Note the server.bind line to restrict Lighty to its own IP and avoid clashing with Apache2:

server.modules = ("mod_rewrite", "mod_accesslog", "mod_fastcgi", "mod_status")
server.bind = "192.168.10.4"
server.port = 80
server.username = "www-data"
server.groupname = "www-data"
server.pid-file = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid"
accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/access.log"
server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/error.log"
server.indexfiles = ( "index.html" )
server.document-root       = "/var/www/"

# assign mime types from /etc/mime.types
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/create-mime.assign.pl"

#### status module
status.status-url = "/server-status"

# first rails site

var.rails1 = "/home/web/rails1.example.com"
$HTTP["host"] == "rails1.example.com" {
  server.document-root = var.rails1 + "/public"
  url.rewrite = ( "^/$" => "index.html", "^([^.]+)$" => "$1.html" )
  server.error-handler-404 = "/dispatch.fcgi"
  accesslog.filename = "/home/web/rails1.example.com/log/access.log"
  server.errorlog = "/home/web/rails1.example.com/log/error.log"
  server.indexfiles = ( "index.html" )
  fastcgi.server = ( ".fcgi" =>
    ( "localhost" =>
      ( "min-procs" => 1,
        "max-procs" => 2,
        "socket" => "/tmp/rails1.fcgi.socket",
        "bin-path" => var.rails1 + "/public/dispatch.fcgi",
        "bin-environment" => ( "RAILS_ENV" => "production" )
      )
    )
  )
}

# second rails site

var.rails2 = "/home/web/rails2.example.com"
$HTTP["host"] == "rails2.example.com" {
  server.document-root = var.rails2 + "/public"
  url.rewrite = ( "^/$" => "index.html", "^([^.]+)$" => "$1.html" )
  server.error-handler-404 = "/dispatch.fcgi"
  accesslog.filename = "/home/web/rails2.example.com/log/access.log"
  server.errorlog = "/home/web/rails2.example.com/log/error.log"
  server.indexfiles = ( "index.html" )
  fastcgi.server = ( ".fcgi" =>
    ( "localhost" =>
      ( "min-procs" => 1,
        "max-procs" => 2,
        "socket" => "/tmp/rails2.fcgi.socket",
        "bin-path" => var.rails2 + "/public/dispatch.fcgi",
        "bin-environment" => ( "RAILS_ENV" => "production" )
      )
    )
  )
}

Having created your config file, fire up Lighty (if you installed Apache2 first, it won't be running already, as port 80 was in use on all interfaces at that point):

/etc/init.d/lighttpd start

Part 3 - Advanced Stuff

So far, so good. By now you should have a server that can host pretty much anything you can throw at it, including multiple Rails sites as well as multiple Apache2/PHP sites, and these sites can use MySQL or PostgreSQL databases.

But what if you have a site that needs both? Supposing you have a PHP-based site running happily on Apache2, and you want to add a typo blog in a subdirectory, say coolsite.example.com/blog. You can't point the domain to both IPs, but what you can do is use Apache2's mod_proxy module to proxy the /blog subdirectory to Lighty. Your Apache2 vhost should look something like this:

<VirtualHost 192.168.10.3:80>
  ServerName coolsite.example.com
  DocumentRoot /home/web/coolsite.example.com/public_html
  Alias /webstat /home/web/coolsite.example.com/stats
  CustomLog    /home/web/coolsite.example.com/logs/access.log combined
  ErrorLog     /home/web/coolsite.example.com/logs/error.log

  ProxyPass /blog http://coolblog/blog
  ProxyPassReverse /blog http://coolblog/blog
  ProxyPreserveHost off
</VirtualHost>

You also need to enable mod_proxy:

a2enmod proxy
/etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

This will cause Apache2 to proxy all requests for /blog to http://coolblog/blog. So you need to add an appropriate line to /etc/hosts:

192.168.10.4  coolblog

Then remove the symbolic link /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/proxy.conf, as by default this will deny access:

rm /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/proxy.conf

You can then set up a vhost in Lighty for the blog:

var.coolblog = "/home/web/blog"
$HTTP["host"] == "coolblog" {
  server.document-root = var.coolblog + "/public"
  url.rewrite = ( "^/$" => "index.html", "^([^.]+)$" => "$1.html" )
  server.error-handler-404 = "/dispatch.fcgi"
  accesslog.filename = "/dev/null"
  fastcgi.server = ( ".fcgi" =>
    ( "localhost" =>
      ( "min-procs" => 1,
        "max-procs" => 2,
        "socket" => "/tmp/coolblog.fcgi.socket",
        "bin-path" => var.coolblog + "/public/dispatch.fcgi",
        "bin-environment" => ( "RAILS_ENV" => "production" )
      )
    )
  )
}

And finally, add the following line to config/environment.rb in the typo installation:

ActionController::AbstractRequest.relative_url_root = "/blog"

And there you have it. You can now point the domain to the Apache2 IP, and it will proxy the /blog namespace through to Lighty. Note that the Lighty vhost is set to send its access log to /dev/null - this is because all the proxied requests will be logged by Apache2, and in any case, the Lighty logs will only show the requests as coming from Apache2, which doesn't make for very useful logs.

Wrap-up

Feel free to pick and choose bits from this tutorial - everyone's situation is different. But if what I've written here helps you, or you find a bug in my carefully-tested procedure, please leave a comment. In the meantime, happy configuring!