While Rails 3 and mod_rails (aka Phusion Passenger) are not yet supported with cPanel, it is possible in 30 minutes or less to install Rails 3.0.9, install mod_rails and get a working application using mod_rails in place of mongrel.
Of note, the steps I am about to provide are to be used at your own risk. cPanel > Ruby on Rails applications cannot and should not be used if you decide to follow this guide, since the current cPanel environment only supports Rails 2.3.12 rather than Rails 3.0.9. Support is being planned for Rails 3 and mod_rails in cPanel 11.34 (more details can be found at this location).
In root SSH to install the newest Rails version to replace Rails 2.3 ones, please run the following command:
gem install rails
Next, install mod_rails with these commands:
gem install passenger
passenger-install-apache2-module
After installation, edit /usr/local/apache/conf/includes/pre_main_global.conf to add the following lines:
LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.8/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.8
PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby
Please change passenger-3.0.8 above to whatever version of passenger was installed when using “gem install passenger” command. To check, you can always run the following command:
# gem list --local | grep -i passenger
passenger (3.0.8)
At that point, make a backup of httpd.conf file, distill the changes, rebuild Apache and restart Apache with these commands:
cp /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf.bak-modrails
/usr/local/cpanel/bin/apache_conf_distiller --update
/scripts/rebuildhttpdconf
/etc/init.d/httpd restart
To test a working application, a hello world application can be generated with the following steps:
rails new /home/username/hello
cd /home/username/hello
rails generate scaffold person name:string password:string email:string age:integer
rake db:create:all
rake db:migrate
After this, create a symlink from /home/username/hello/public to /home/username/public_html/hello folder:
ln -s /home/username/hello/public /home/username/public_html/hello
Copy the development database in sqlite to the production one:
cd /home/username/hello/db
cp development.sqlite3 production.sqlite3
Chown the application files to the user:
chown -R username:username /home/username/hello
Finally, create a rewrite for the subdomain folder and restart Apache again:
echo "RailsBaseURI /hello" >> /home/username/hello/public/.htaccess
/etc/init.d/httpd restart
For an example application, one is available at the following location that was based on using the above guide: http://tristanwallace.com/hello/people
Hopefully, these instructions will help anyone who does require mod_rails and Rails 3 to function in the meantime prior to cPanel 11.34
– Posted by Tristan Wallace
