Deploy a Ruby on Rails App with Unicorn and nginx on Ubuntu 14.04

Select distribution:
Traducciones al Español
Estamos traduciendo nuestros guías y tutoriales al Español. Es posible que usted esté viendo una traducción generada automáticamente. Estamos trabajando con traductores profesionales para verificar las traducciones de nuestro sitio web. Este proyecto es un trabajo en curso.
Deprecated

This guide has been deprecated and is no longer being maintained. Please refer to the updated version of this guide.

Create a Linode account to try this guide with a $ credit.
This credit will be applied to any valid services used during your first  days.

Ruby on Rails is a popular web-application framework that allows developers to create dynamic web applications. This guide describes how to deploy Rails applications on servers using Unicorn and nginx on Ubuntu 14.04.

Unicorn is an HTTP server, just like Passenger or Puma. Since Unicorn cannot be accessed by users directly we will be using nginx as the reverse proxy that will buffer requests and response between users and Rails application.

Before You Begin

Before starting this guide, make sure that you have read through and completed our Creating a Compute Instance and Setting Up and Securing a Compute Instance guide.

Note
This guide is written for a non-root user. Commands that require elevated privileges are prefixed with sudo. If you’re not familiar with the sudo command, you can check our Users and Groups guide.
  1. Before you install any package, ensure that your hostname is correct:

    hostname
    hostname -f
    
  2. Make sure your system is up to date:

    sudo apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
    

Install Ruby

  1. Install Ruby dependencies:

    sudo apt-get install git-core curl zlib1g-dev build-essential libssl-dev libreadline-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev python-software-properties libffi-dev nodejs
    
  2. Download the latest version of Ruby. At the time of writing this article, the current, most recent and stable version is 2.3, but you can check for the latest version here:

    wget https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/2.3/ruby-2.3.0.tar.gz
    
  3. Unpack the tarball:

    tar -xzvf ruby-2.3.0.tar.gz
    
  4. Move to the extracted directory:

    cd ruby-2.3.0
    
  5. Configure and install Ruby from source:

    ./configure
    make
    sudo make install
    

Install and Create a Rails Application

  1. Install Rails on the server using gem (the package management framework for Ruby):

    sudo gem install rails
    
  2. Before creating your project, move to the home directory:

    cd
    
  3. Create a new Rails project. You will be using example as your project name:

    rails new example
    
  4. Move to the project directory:

    cd example
    

Install and Configure Unicorn

  1. Install Unicorn on the server using gem:

    sudo gem install unicorn
    
  2. Create the file config/unicorn.rb which contains the unicorn configuration and paste the following configuration in the file.

    File: /home/username/example/config/unicorn.rb
     1
     2
     3
     4
     5
     6
     7
     8
     9
    10
    11
    12
    13
    14
    15
    16
    17
    18
    19
    
    # set path to the application
    app_dir = File.expand_path("../..", __FILE__)
    shared_dir = "#{app_dir}/shared"
    working_directory app_dir
    
    # Set unicorn options
    worker_processes 2
    preload_app true
    timeout 30
    
    # Path for the Unicorn socket
    listen "#{shared_dir}/sockets/unicorn.sock", :backlog => 64
    
    # Set path for logging
    stderr_path "#{shared_dir}/log/unicorn.stderr.log"
    stdout_path "#{shared_dir}/log/unicorn.stdout.log"
    
    # Set proccess id path
    pid "#{shared_dir}/pids/unicorn.pid"
  3. Now, create the directories mentioned in the Unicorn config file:

    mkdir -p shared/pids shared/sockets shared/log
    
    Note
    Please note that we are still in the Rails application directory.

Install and Configure Nginx

  1. Install nginx:

    sudo apt-get install nginx
    
  2. We need to configure nginx to work as the reverse proxy. Edit the config file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf and paste the following configuration in the HTTP block:

    File: /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
    1
    2
    3
    4
    
    upstream rails {
    # Path to Unicorn socket file
    server unix:/home/username/example/shared/sockets/unicorn.sock fail_timeout=0;
    }
    Note
    Edit username and example with appropriate values.
  3. Remove the default nginx site configuration:

    sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
    
  4. Create new nginx site configuration file for the Rails application:

    File: /etc/nginx/sites-available/example
     1
     2
     3
     4
     5
     6
     7
     8
     9
    10
    11
    12
    13
    14
    15
    16
    17
    18
    19
    
    server {
    listen 80;
    server_name localhost;
    
    root /home/username/example;
    
    try_files $uri/index.html $uri @rails;
    
    location @rails {
       proxy_pass http://rails;
       proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
       proxy_redirect off;
    }
    
    error_page 500 502 503 504 /500.html;
    client_max_body_size 4G;
    keepalive_timeout 10;
    }
    Note
    Make sure you change the username and example with the appropriate values.
  5. Create a symlink to nginx’s sites-enabled directory to enable your site configuration file:

    sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
    
  6. Restart nginx:

    sudo service nginx restart
    

Start Unicorn

  • To start Unicorn in the development environment:

      sudo unicorn -c config/unicorn.rb -E development -D
    
  • To start Unicorn in the production environment:

      sudo unicorn -c config/unicorn.rb -E production -D
    
    Note
    Make sure you are in the application directory; otherwise, you will need to type in the whole path name.
  • To stop Unicorn, issue the following command:

      sudo pkill unicorn
    

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

This page was originally published on


Your Feedback Is Important

Let us know if this guide was helpful to you.


Join the conversation.
Read other comments or post your own below. Comments must be respectful, constructive, and relevant to the topic of the guide. Do not post external links or advertisements. Before posting, consider if your comment would be better addressed by contacting our Support team or asking on our Community Site.
The Disqus commenting system for Linode Docs requires the acceptance of Functional Cookies, which allow us to analyze site usage so we can measure and improve performance. To view and create comments for this article, please update your Cookie Preferences on this website and refresh this web page. Please note: You must have JavaScript enabled in your browser.