Linux – What dir should I deploy Rails apps into

apache-2.2deploymentlinuxredhatruby-on-rails

What would be a reasonable and logical directory into which to deploy my production Rails apps on a Linux system?

Some candidates…

/var/rails  <= There's a /var/www so this would be consistent with that 
               pattern. But I.T. guys have complained about stuff in /var 
               before.

/home/my_home_dir/rails  <= OK, not /var, but I'm not the only developer. 
                            Seems like it really ought to be a systemwide
                            location.

/home/rails  <= I don't know. That just seems weird.

/rails  <= Seems even weirder.

What is the least astonishing, most normal thing to do here?

(Background info — a Rails app is a bunch of server side code written in Ruby along with a public dir containing JavaScript, CSS, and maybe a little HTML. The public dir is mapped to an Apache vhost. Apache handles the Ruby code through a module called Passenger or mod_rails.)

Thanks for the help, all. I think I'm going to go with /opt/deployed_rails_apps. (I like long, expository directory names, and tab completion.) /var/... is also a good place, but I've gotten stern grumbling from I.T. when I tried to deploy stuff there. If it were my own machine I might go with /var or /srv.

Best Answer

I think /opt would be the place for an application like this. I agree with following the FHS as suggested by chmeee, but I don't agree that a Rails app is a service per se.

Related Solutions

Host Ruby on Rails Tracks on Apache2

Specify correct PassengerRoot in your apache configuration file. It seems that passenger gem installed not into your home directory or it has other version than 3.0.2.

How to set up Apache with Passenger (mod_rails) on Mac OS X

I was recently awarded the popular question badge for this question, so I thought it was about time I posted the answer. I'll just post the relevant parts of my conf files.

So in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf I have the following:

LoadModule passenger_module /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.7/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.7
PassengerRuby /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby

Also make sure to uncomment the following line:

Include /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Then in /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf I have the following:

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName example.dyndns.org
   DocumentRoot "/Users/Shared/rails/project/public"
   <Directory /Users/Shared/rails/project/public>
      AllowOverride all
      Options -MultiViews
      Order allow,deny
      Allow from all
   </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

After today I will not have access to this server. We don't use it anymore. Instead we use Heroku. So if it's not working for you, for some reason, or I've forgot some vital part of the configuration, I will not be able to help you. It may be outdated and I don't know if it works with newer versions of passenger. Also the server was using Mac OS X Snow Leopard, so it may not work with other versions of OS X. However, my guess is that it hasn't changed all that much and that most of this is still valid.

I also want another disclaimer. This may not be the safest configuration. I don't understand all the options, but it seems to be very allowing. I had a colleague help me with the configuration and this is simply the first version of the configuration that we got working. We did not care much about the security since it was only a dev server and not production.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve the configuration, please feel free to post those. Even though I will not have any use for those, others still might. After all, this is a popular question.

Related Topic

Apache Passenger displaying the Rails application contents