sethbc's (infrequent) blog...

I know dapper is in pre-release right now, but I decided to go ahead and get flight2 up and running, and document my experience installing Typo from scratch.

This install basically requires 2 steps, only one of which I’m going to document. The first step, is installing Ubuntu Dapper Flight 2, and this is up to you. These instructions will almost certainly work with Breezy, and possibly some of the older versions of Ubuntu. As far as Debian is concerned, I have no idea whether or not this will work, so YMMV.

Ubuntu Repository Data
First and foremost, in order to have a working Rails install, we’re going to need to enable the universe repository.

Open /etc/apt/sources.list, and make sure to uncomment the lines for the universe repository.

Ruby
As rails is written in Ruby, you need to install a working ruby environment with all the bells and whistles!

sudo apt-get install ruby irb irb1.8  libdbm-ruby1.8 libfcgi-ruby1.8 libfcgi0 libgdbm-ruby1.8 libopenssl-ruby1.8 libruby1.8-dbg ri ri1.8 ruby1.8-dev
 

RubyGems
Because ubuntu doesn’t include rubygems in their repository, you have to install rubygems from source. Fortunately, this isn’t a very complicated installation method, and rubygems has a mechanism to insure it stays up to date outside of APT.

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/5207/rubygems-0.8.11.tgz
tar zxvf rubygems-0.8.11.tgz
cd rubygems-0.8.11
sudo ruby1.8 setup.rb
 

As of this writing, Rubygems-0.8.11 was the most current version of rubygems, but you might want to make sure that rubygems is up to date with this command: sudo gem install rubygems-update

Installing Mysql
Typo doesn’t require MySQL, but that’s the database that I use to host my blog. To install MySQL, we simply:

sudo apt-get install mysql-common libmysqlclient12 libmysqlclient12-dev mysql-server libmysql-ruby1.8
    

I know that libmysql-ruby1.8 installs the mysql ruby bindings, but in order to make sure I have the most updated bindings, I run:

sudo gem install mysql -y
    

Installing Rails

sudo gem install rails -y
    

Installing Apache2 with fastcgi bindings

sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-fcgid
sudo a2enmod fcgid
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
    

Build Essential
Technically, the build-essential packages aren’t necessary, as there are fcgi libraries in Ubuntu, but I always install them anyway. You never know when you’re going to need this stuff

sudo apt-get install build-essential
 

At this point, rails should be installed and functioning.

FastCGI
There are two ways to go about installing FastCGI support, one through APT, the other directly from source.

apt-get install libfcgi-dev
sudo gem install fcgi

Other Modules
There are a number of useful gems that one can install, and installation is a snap with Rubygems.

Say for example you want to install the flickr interface. You’d simply type

sudo gem install flickr -y

and the gem is automagically installed.

Installing Typo
I’m installing typo from the SVN repository, as I find that the code isn’t too ‘bleeding edge,’ and staying current generally has more benefits than drawbacks. In order to check out the code, I went to the

/var/www/

directory, and typed

svn checkout svn://leetsoft.com/typo/trunk typo

Typo is now installed on the machine, but we first have to create the database, add the typo host, and then make some changes in order to ensure that the proper page is displayed.

Creating the typo database is a fairly simple procedure. Use mysqladmin to create the databases like this:

mysqladmin -u root -p create typo_dev
mysqladmin -u root -p create typo_tests
   

Optionally, you can create a separate database for production usage as well. Then import the database schema like so:

cd /var/www/typo/db
mysql -u root -p typo_dev < schema.mysql-v3.sql

Finally you need to edit the

config/database.yml

file. Mine is set up as follows:

login: &login
  adapter: mysql
  host: localhost
  username: root
  password: ROOT_PASSWORD

development:
  database: typo_dev
  <<: *login

test:
  database: typo_tests
  <<: *login

production:
  database: typo_dev
  <<: *login
  

I created my own vhost for typo. I created a file called

typo

in

/etc/apache2/sites-available

. For the contents of the file i included the following:

NameVirtualHost *

    ServerName sethbc.org
    DocumentRoot /var/www/typo/public/
    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
    LogLevel warn

    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/typo.log combined

   
      Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
      AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
      AllowOverride all
      Order allow,deny
      Allow from all
   

After creating the vhost, make sure to restart apache with

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

.

The next step in the installation is modifying typo to work properly with the default Ubuntu fcgid handler. In order to do this, open the

.htaccess

file in the public directory of your typo installation, and change

AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi

to

AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi

What else can you do?
I’m planning on writing another one of these, with the aim of getting lighttpd running on ubuntu. As of right now, there is a request for inclusion of lighttpd in Ubuntu, and I’m under the impression that it is now approved for debian, so that should speed the process up somewhat.

Resources
Ruby, Rails, Apache 2 and Ubuntu Breezy (5.10) – http://fo64.com/articles/2005/10/20/rails-on-breezy

RailsOnUbuntuDebianTestingAndUnstable – http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/RailsOnUbuntuDebianTestingAndUnstable

How to install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu 5.10 – http://claudio.cicali.org/article/74/how-to-install-ruby-on-rails-on-ubuntu-510