[Don write:blog];

Configure the server

Get a server with Ubuntu

With Rackspace Cloud Servers, this is very easy. Login to Rackspace, choose Cloud Servers under Hosting, click Add Server, and choose your OS. I chose Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot). In just a minute, you’ll have an IP address and root credentials that you can use for ssh.

Install Stuff

I did everything using ssh. If you’ve never done this, Google it and learn the best way to do it on your platform.

When you first get your server, it is pretty bare. Let’s get some stuff installed. First, you’ll want to update apt-get so that it installs the latest versions of everything:

$ apt-get update

Then, upgrade all the currently installed packages (-y means say yes to all prompts):

$ apt-get upgrade -y

Now, we’ll install new stuff:

$ apt-get install git-core, build-essentials, curl, zlib1g-dev, \
    libxml2-dev, libxslt1-dev, openssl, nodejs, postgresql, libpq-dev, \
    nginx

I installed nodejs, so that I’d have a javascript runtime to compile my static assets. The postgresql packages is to run a PostgreSQL server on the machine. The ligpq-dev is so that my pg ruby gem can connect to the PostgreSQL server. The git-core package is so that I can run a git pull command to update the code on the server. Everything else is a pretty fundamental need.

Since I used rbenv and ruby-build for ruby, I didn’t install any ruby package here. Instead, I just made sure that all ruby’s dependencies were installed.

$ apt-get build-dep ruby1.9.3

Create a new user

Now, we need to create a user for our app to run as. I called mine app_user.

$ useradd -m -g staff app_user

The -m option will create the new user’s home directory (/home/app_user). The -g option tells it which group to add the user to (staff).

Set your new user’s password.

$ passwd app_user

To allow app_user to execute commands with super-user privileges, you need to add him to the sudoers file located at /etc/sudoers.

# /etc/sudoers
app_user ALL=(ALL) ALL

Now you’re set to log out as root and log back in as app_user. If I specify any commands that it says you don’t have rights to access, just put sudo in front of the command, enter app_user’s password and it will let you.

Ruby

I really like rbenv. These steps are mostly copied from its homepage, but slightly simplified for my use case.

Clone rbenv into ~/.rbenv.

$ cd
$ git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv.git .rbenv

Add ~/.rbenv/bin to your $PATH for access to the rbenv command-line utility.

$ echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile

Add rbenv init to your shell to enable shims and autocompletion.

$ echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bash_profile

Restart your shell so the path changes take effect. You can now begin using rbenv.

$ exec $SHELL

Now, we’ll install ruby-build that makes it really simple to install ruby.

$ mkdir -p ~/.rbenv/plugins
$ cd ~/.rbenv/plugins
$ git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/ruby-build.git

$ rbenv install 1.9.3-p125

Set the global version of ruby to 1.9.3.

$ rbenv global 1.9.3-p125

Rebuild the shim binaries. You should do this any time you install a new Ruby binary (for example, when installing a new Ruby version, or when installing a gem that provides a binary).

$ rbenv rehash

We’re done installing ruby. Let’s add some reasonable defaults for installing ruby gems.

# ~/.gemrc
---
:update_sources: true
:verbose: true
:buld_threshold: 1000
:backtrace: false
:benchmark: false
gem: --no-ri --no-rdoc

Now let’s just install a couple ruby gems that will allow us to use capistrano later.

$ gem install rake
$ gem install bundler
$ rbenv rehash