How-to: Host Rails App on OpenShift for FREE

There are many great options for hosting your rails application. For instances, PaaS like engine yard and heroku provide great scalability and automations to ease your deployment. VPS like Linode provides more traditional hosting services, which gives you full control of a node. But what if you just want to test your idea and have a public domain name (no tunneling and router tricks)? Then OpenShift is a great choice, cause it is FREE! (at least for your first 3 gears)

Good Resources

  • Official rails quick starter guide.

  • Official sample rails app on github.

  • Official documentation on deployment scripts.

  • Deployment tutorial guide.

Deployment

This guide will be similar to steps described in the resouces mentioned above. I will add my thoughts to some of the steps.

1. Create an OpenShift account.

2. Install rhc gem. (If you are using rvm, don’t use sudo.)

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gem install rhc

3. Create your cartridge. This should create a folder called [your_rails_app_name] at ..

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rhc app create -a [your_rails_app_name] -t ruby-1.9

4. Add database support to your application.

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rhc cartridge add -a [your_rails_app_name] -c [database_name]

Here is a list of supported database.

Short Name Full name
10gen-mms-agent-0.1 10gen Mongo Monitoring Service Agent
cron-1.4 Cron 1.4
jenkins-client-1 Jenkins Client
mongodb-2.2 MongoDB NoSQL Database 2.2
mysql-5.1 MySQL Database 5.1
metrics-0.1 OpenShift Metrics 0.1
haproxy-1.4 OpenShift Web Balancer
phpmyadmin-3 phpMyAdmin 3.4
postgresql-8.4 PostgreSQL Database 8.4
postgresql-9.2 PostgreSQL Database 9.2
rockmongo-1.1 RockMongo 1.1
switchyard-0 SwitchYard 0.8.0

5. Add deploy script to [your_rails_app_name]/.openshift/action_hooks/.

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touch [your_rails_app_name]/.openshift/action_hooks/deploy

Add the following code to deploy file to initialize database.

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pushd ${OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR} > /dev/null
bundle exec rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV="production"
popd > /dev/null

NOTE: This might be obvious to experienced Linux user, but I failed to realize this the first time. You have to do a sudo chmod +x [your_rails_app_name]/.openshift/action_hooks/deploy on your deploy script or it won’t be run by the server.

6. Change production database configuration in config/database.yml. Then submit your change to your github repository.

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production:
  adapter: mysql2
  encoding: utf8
  reconnect: false
  pool: 5
  database: <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_APP_NAME']%>
  username: <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_USERNAME']%>
  password: <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_PASSWORD']%>
  socket: <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_SOCKET']%>
  host: <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_HOST']%>
  port: <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_PORT']%>

NOTE: Remember to change adapter and ENV variable to corresponding database your are using. For example, If your are using postgresql then change <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_USERNAME']%> to <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_POSTGRESQL_DB_USERNAME']%>

7. Download your rails application from your github repository.

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cd railsapp
git remote add upstream -m master [your_git_repo_ssh_url]
git pull -s recursive -X theirs upstream master

8. Do git push. git push will initialize the server and trigger the deploy script. If everything goes alright, you should see your application running on http://[your_rails_app_name]-[your_namespace].rhcloud.com. You can customize your domain name too. Check this post out to learn details.

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