Installing Rails 3 + Ruby 1.9.2 + Phusion Passenger + Nginx on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

In this post you will find detail steps to set up a production server for a Rails 3 application with Ruby 1.9.2 + Phusion Passenger + Nginx on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Make sure Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is installed. Do the ssh login on server and follow the below steps:

apt-get update
apt-get -y install build-essential zlib1g zlib1g-dev libxml2 libxml2-dev libxslt-dev
apt-get git-core
apt-get -y install curl wget

Now you are ready to install the latest Ruby 1.9.2

wget http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.2-p0.tar.gz

Extract the tar and run the configure, make and make install commands as follows:

tar -xvf ruby-1.9.2-p0.tar.gz
./configure
make
make install

This will install ruby 1.9.2, you can confirm this by running:

ruby -v

Next step is to install rails, now when you install gems on a production server you probably do not want to install any documentation along with it. To skip documentation by default when you install gems create/edit the .gemrc file in your home directory:

---
:update_sources: true
:sources:
- http://gems.rubyforge.org/
- http://gems.github.com
:benchmark: false
:bulk_threshold: 1000
:backtrace: false
:verbose: true
gem: --no-ri --no-rdoc

Ready to install rails now with the following command:

gem install rails

Now, to install Phusion Passenge and Nginx:

gem install passenger
passenger-install-nginx-module

When I ran passenger-install-nginx-module command, I got the following error:
OpenSSL support for Ruby… not found

Openssl package needed, to install this follow the below steps:

cd /usr/local/src/ruby-1.9.2-p0/ext/openssl
ruby extconf.rb
make
make install

You can install either using this sudo apt-get install openssl

All steps are done! Nginx is installed in “/opt/nginx”

To start Nginx type this command “/opt/nginx/sbin/nginx” and to stop type “kill nginx”