What a crazy day.. nothing better than coming home from a mad day at the office, slaving over a hot Windows PC, and sitting down comfortably in front of a unix terminal to chill out.
We’re incredibly disorganized around the house – many, many little projects that we just seem to lose track of. Ditto for my business. Setting up a project-management tool as a mean to get things happening seemed like a good idea.. but I never seemed to find the time.. :)
I’ve tried running Rails apps on Dreamhost but they always seem to run like a dog. No offence to DH – the shared hosting is brilliant for static sites and seems to run PHP really well. But Rails always seems a bit tricky. And given that I tend to want to play with more exotic setups for Rails I really wanted something I had more control over. I looked around and at the bottom end of the VPS market most of the offerings seem pretty similar. In a toss-up between Slicehost and Linode I went with the latter purely because of some good press I’d read (and now cannot find.. maybe I dreamt it).
With a freshly-minted Linode server running, I set up a clean install of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to finally install Redmine on to. I tried setting up Rails using one of Linode’s handy-dandy scripts, but I couldn’t get it to work. Everything seemed to go OK with the script, but it failed to install Ruby (the whole point of me running it). I probably did something wrong, but the whole thing was a bit magical. I’d rather take personal responsibility for screwing up the server.
A quick googling found this excellent article for setting up Ruby on Rails, Nginx, etc. A couple of the links need to be updated, but all-in-all it worked a dream.
As per the instructions from the Inveigled Software dude (or dudess) I got the latest version of Ruby Enterprise from here:
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/68719/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2010.01.tar.gz
And modified all the references to the Ruby Enterprise source.
The nginx initialization script has escaped " and & tokens all over the place, and these have to be replaced with ” or && respectively.
Went through the rest of the instructions and had an Nginx install working in minutes. So far the whole Linode experience has been a good one. Next step, getting Redmine installed and running..
