$ sudo yum install -y postgresql postgresql-server postgresql-devel
Ruby on Rails is a popular web framework written in Ruby. This guide covers using Rails 4 on OpenShift Origin.
We strongly advise going through the whole tutorial to have an overview of all the steps necessary to run your application on the OpenShift Origin. If you experience a problem try reading through the entire tutorial and then going back to your issue. It can also be useful to review your previous steps to ensure that all the steps were executed correctly. |
For this guide you will need:
Basic Ruby/Rails knowledge
Locally installed version of Ruby 2.0.0+, Rubygems, Bundler
Basic Git knowledge
Running instance of OpenShift Origin v3
First make sure that an instance of OpenShift Origin is running and is available.
For
more info on how to get OpenShift Origin up and running check the
installation methods.
Also make sure that your oc
CLI
client is installed and the command is accessible from your command shell, so
you can use it to
log in
using your email address and password.
Rails applications are almost always used with a database. For the local development we chose the PostgreSQL database. To install it type:
$ sudo yum install -y postgresql postgresql-server postgresql-devel
Next you need to initialize the database with:
$ sudo postgresql-setup initdb
This command will create the /var/lib/pgsql/data
directory, in which the data will be stored.
Start the database by typing:
$ sudo systemctl start postgresql.service
When the database is running, create your rails
user:
$ sudo -u postgres createuser -s rails
Note that the user we created has no password.
If you are starting your Rails application from scratch, you need to install the Rails gem first.
$ gem install rails Successfully installed rails-4.2.0 1 gem installed
After you install the Rails gem create a new application, with PostgreSQL as your database:
$ rails new rails-app --database=postgresql
Then change into your new application directory.
$ cd rails-app
If you already have an application, make sure the pg
(postgresql) gem is present in your Gemfile
. If not
edit your Gemfile
by adding the gem:
gem 'pg'
To generate a new Gemfile.lock
with all your dependencies run:
$ bundle install
In addition to using the postgresql
database with the pg
gem, you’ll also need to ensure the config/database.yml
is using the postgresql
adapter.
Make sure you updated default
section in the config/database.yml
file, so it looks like this:
default: &default adapter: postgresql encoding: unicode pool: 5 host: localhost username: rails password:
Create your application’s development and test databases by using this rake
command:
$ rake db:create
This will create development
and test
database in your PostgreSQL server.
Since Rails 4 no longer serves a static public/index.html
page in production, we need to create a
new root page.
In order to have a custom welcome page we need to do following steps:
Create a controller with an index action
Create a view page for the welcome
controller index
action
Create a route that will serve applications root page with the created controller and view
Rails offers a generator that will do all this necessary steps for you.
$ rails generate controller welcome index
All the necessary files have been created, now we just need to edit line 2 in config/routes.rb
file to look like:
root 'welcome#index'
Run the rails server to verify the page is available.
$ rails server
You should see your page by visiting http://localhost:3000 in your browser. If you don’t see the page, check the logs that are output to your server to debug.
In order to have your application communicating with the PostgreSQL database service that will be running in OpenShift Origin, you will need to edit the default
section in your config/database.yml
to use environment variables, which you will define later, upon the database service creation.
The default
section in your edited config/database.yml
together with pre-defined variables should look like:
<% user = ENV.key?("POSTGRESQL_ADMIN_PASSWORD") ? "root" : ENV["POSTGRESQL_USER"] %> <% password = ENV.key?("POSTGRESQL_ADMIN_PASSWORD") ? ENV["POSTGRESQL_ADMIN_PASSWORD"] : ENV["POSTGRESQL_PASSWORD"] %> <% db_service = ENV.fetch("DATABASE_SERVICE_NAME","").upcase %> default: &default adapter: postgresql encoding: unicode # For details on connection pooling, see rails configuration guide # http://guides.rubyonrails.org/configuring.html#database-pooling pool: <%= ENV["POSTGRESQL_MAX_CONNECTIONS"] || 5 %> username: <%= user %> password: <%= password %> host: <%= ENV["#{db_service}_SERVICE_HOST"] %> port: <%= ENV["#{db_service}_SERVICE_PORT"] %> database: <%= ENV["POSTGRESQL_DATABASE"] %>
For an example of how the final file should look, see Ruby on Rails example application config/database.yml.
OpenShift Origin requires git, if you don’t have it installed you will need to install it.
Building an application in OpenShift Origin usually requires that the source code be stored in a git repository, so you will need to install git
if you do not already have it.
Make sure you are in your Rails application directory by running the ls -1
command. The output of the command should look like:
$ ls -1 app bin config config.ru db Gemfile Gemfile.lock lib log public Rakefile README.rdoc test tmp vendor
Now run these commands in your Rails app directory to initialize and commit your code to git:
$ git init $ git add . $ git commit -m "initial commit"
Once your application is committed you need to push it to a remote repository. For this you would need a GitHub account, in which you create a new repository.
Set the remote that points to your git
repository:
$ git remote add origin git@github.com:<namespace/repository-name>.git
After that, push your application to your remote git repository.
$ git push
To deploy your Ruby on Rails application, create a new Project for the application:
$ oc new-project rails-app --description="My Rails application" --display-name="Rails Application"
After creating the the rails-app
project, you will be automatically switched to the new project namespace.
Deploying your application in OpenShift Origin involves three steps:
Creating a database service from OpenShift Origin’s PostgreSQL image
Creating a frontend service from OpenShift Origin’s Ruby 2.0 builder image and your Ruby on Rails source code, which we wire with the database service
Creating a route for your application.
Your Rails application expects a running database service. For this service use PostgeSQL database image.
To create the database service you will use the oc new-app command. To this command you will need to pass some necessary environment variables which will be used inside the database container. These environment variables are required to set the username, password, and name of the database. You can change the values of these environment variables to anything you would like. The variables we are going to be setting are as follows:
POSTGRESQL_DATABASE
POSTGRESQL_USER
POSTGRESQL_PASSWORD
Setting these variables ensures:
A database exists with the specified name
A user exists with the specified name
The user can access the specified database with the specified password
For example:
$ oc new-app postgresql -e POSTGRESQL_DATABASE=db_name -e POSTGRESQL_USER=username -e POSTGRESQL_PASSWORD=password
To also set the password for the database administrator, append to the previous command with:
-e POSTGRESQL_ADMIN_PASSWORD=admin_pw
To watch the progress of this command:
$ oc get pods --watch
To bring your application to OpenShift Origin, you need to specify a repository in which your application lives, using once again the oc new-app command, in which you will need to specify database related environment variables we setup in the Creating the Database Service:
$ oc new-app path/to/source/code --name=rails-app -e POSTGRESQL_USER=username -e POSTGRESQL_PASSWORD=password -e POSTGRESQL_DATABASE=db_name
With this command, OpenShift Origin fetches the source code, sets up the builder image, builds your application image, and deploys the newly created image together with the specified environment variables. The application is named rails-app
.
You can verify the environment variables have been added by viewing the JSON document of the rails-app
DeploymentConfig:
$ oc get dc rails-app -o json
You should see the following section:
env": [ { "name": "POSTGRESQL_USER", "value": "username" }, { "name": "POSTGRESQL_PASSWORD", "value": "password" }, { "name": "POSTGRESQL_DATABASE", "value": "db_name" } ],
To check the build process:
$ oc logs -f build rails-app-1
Once the build is complete, you can look at the running pods in OpenShift Origin.
$ oc get pods
You should see a line starting with myapp-<number>-<hash>
, and that is your
application running in OpenShift Origin.
Before your application will be functional, you need to initialize the database by running the database migration script. There are two ways you can do this:
Manually from the running frontend container:
First you need to exec into frontend container with rsh command:
$ oc rsh <FRONTEND_POD_ID>
Run the migration from inside the container:
$ RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake db:migrate
If you are running your Rails application in a development
or test
environment you don’t have to specify the RAILS_ENV
environment variable.
By adding pre-deployment lifecycle hooks in your template. For example check the hooks example in our Rails example application.
To expose a service by giving it an externally-reachable hostname like www.example.com
use OpenShift Origin route. In your case you need to expose the frontend service by typing:
$ oc expose service rails-app --hostname=www.example.com
It’s the user’s responsibility to ensure the hostname they specify resolves into the IP address of the router. For more information, check the OpenShift Origin documentation on: |