I’ve just finished setting up Rails on a freshly installed Ubuntu. This setup uses Mysql, Apache2 and fcgid as the fastcgi ‘driver’. I’d like to share all the steps and packages needed:

1. Install ruby1.8 and the such

sudo apt-get install ruby1.8 ruby1.8-dev ruby irb rdoc libyaml-ruby libzlib-ruby

2. Install the gem package manager

wget rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/5207/rubygems-0.8.11.tgz
tar xzvf rubygems-0.8.11.tgz
cd rubygems-0.8.11
sudo ruby setup.rb
sudo gem update --system

3. Install rails and all its dependencies

sudo gem install rails -y

4. Install the Mysql development libraries

sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient12-dev

If you’re working with MySQL 5, you need to install libmysqlclient14-dev instead.

5. Install the Ruby Mysql C bindings

wget http://tmtm.org/downloads/mysql/ruby/mysql-ruby-2.7.tar.gz
tar xvzf mysql-ruby-2.7.tar.gz
cd mysql-ruby-2.7
ruby extconf.rb
make
sudo make install

(Note: this step could perhaps be simply substituted with sudo gem install mysql)

UPDATE: This step could be “apt-get’ed” with: apt-get install libmysql-ruby but I prefer the former because it ensures to have the most recent bindings installed.

6. Install mod_fcgid

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-fcgid

7. Activate fcgid and rewrite modules

cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled
sudo ln -s ../mods-available/fcgid.conf
sudo ln -s ../mods-available/fcgid.load
sudo ln -s ../mods-available/rewrite.load

Update: a2enmod fcgid is the “ubuntu way” to activate the fcgid module (and rewrite as well, of course).

8. Configure fcgid

You can tweak fcgid editing /etc/apache2/mods-available/fcgid.conf

Add this line to specify (globally) a rails environment:

DefaultInitEnv RAILS_ENV production

Other parameters of interest could be

  IdleTimeout 60
  ProcessLifeTime 6000
  MaxProcessCount 32
  DefaultMaxClassProcessCount 2
  IPCConnectTimeout 6
  IPCCommTimeout 6

Refer to the fcgid documentation for the meaning of each parameter.

9. Install ruby support for fcgi

sudo apt-get install libfcgi-ruby1.8

10. Create one rails application (optional)

cd ~/public_html
rails testapp

11. Create a named virtual host (optional)

Create a named virtual host a point its document root to the public directory of the rails application. Hint: you can use something like testapp.localdomain, for test purposes; just add testapp.localdomain to your /etc/hosts. Delete index.html inside /public as well.

12. Modify .htaccess

Now we need to modify a line inside .htaccess. AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi becomes AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi Also, be sure to have this line: RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]

13. Is database.yaml ok?

Verify that into /config/database.yaml no sockets are used

14. Configure fcgid for development purposes

It seems that fcgid is much more aggressive in its default setting for “caching” connections than fastcgi. This can be a problem while developing (the same page keeps being served even if it is actually modified). You can tune this behaviour using the IdelTimeout and IdleScanInterval directives. They have to be put in your httpd.conf, not in any VirtualHost. fcgid documentation is very poor (stating a binary compatibility with the much better documented mod_fastcgi, which is, imho, not perfect). I personally use “60” as the value for IdleTimeout and “10” as the value for IdleScanTimeout. This values were quite randomly choosen, based upon the “300” and “100” default ones.

<IfModule mod_fcgid.c>
    IdleTimeout 60
    IdleScanInterval 10
</IfModule>

Update: note that fastcgi are not intended to be used in a development environment. Use webrick, instead.

Update: As davidw noted (look at the first comment), if you get weird errors with fcgid not working, try adding

  IPCCommTimeout  20
  IPCConnectTimeout 20

to the fcgid configuration parameters.

15. Your log dir must be writeable by the web server

To have fastcgi write its error log (fastcgi.crash) be sure to have the /log directory owned by www-data.

Done.