Category Archives: Ruby on Rails

Nginx, Rails and PHP: Round 2!

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It’s been a while since I posted about my current webserver setup, and a few things have changed around here!  I like to stay current, and the latest version of PHP has changed the way I build from source.  I’ve also changed the way I install stuff, this way it’s much easier to update things like PHP which tend to litter files all over the place.  Anyway, you came here for the goods, so here we go:

Step 1:  Environment and Pre-Requisites

This section probably looks familiar.  The only difference now is that I’m running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my main server now.  The packages are pretty much the same.  First we make sure the universe repository is enabled by editing /etc/apt/sources.list and removing the hash marks in front of universe lines:

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Windows + Ruby Native Gems (1.9.1)

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A few weeks back I posted about getting the ruby-debug-ide gem installed in Windows under Ruby 1.8.6.  In that post I outlined how hacking a header file and using the Visual C++ 2008 compiler could be leveraged to get the gem built and installed properly.  Well, after a helpful comment from a reader and watching a few screencasts over on TekPub, I actually found a way to do this with Ruby 1.9.1 from RubyInstaller.org.

As you know, I swapped my Windows development environment for Mac OSX, and so far learning Rails has been a great pleasure thanks to Agile Web Development with Rails (Third Edition) from The Pragmatic Programmers.  When I found this alternate method for installing ruby-debug-ide I decided to fire up my Windows 7 VM and give it a go.  Here are the gems I have currently installed on my VM:

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Switching to OSX Full-Time

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I’ve been stuck for a while now.  There are so many amazing technologies and frameworks out there, and I’ve finally decided to devote some serious time to one of the best (in my opinion) which is Rails.  I know I’ve talked about this in the past, and, frankly, I’ve been either too busy or too lazy to seriously devote time to it.  But this year I’ve decided to make a resolution to seriously learn Rails by rebuilding this blog with it.  I know there are a million blog platforms out there, especially when you consider the fact that every geek seems to write their own.  I know I’m going to be re-inventing the wheel here, and I am in no way disappointed with WordPress.  But the best way for me to learn is to just dive in head-first and get my hands dirty, so that’s exactly what I’m doing.

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Nginx and Rails and PHP, Oh My!

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As you could probably guess, my blog (and several sites of my friends) are hosted on a lovely Linux VPS provided by Linode.  I honestly can’t say enough nice things about the service and reliability I’ve received from Linode (and no they don’t pay me to speak highly of them!).  But that’s not really the point of this post.  The point is actually quite simple:  My VPS doesn’t have a lot of memory, and I’m always wary of my resource consumption.  A few months ago, I moved from Apache to lighttpd for this reason, alone.  Let’s face it… Apache is a memory hog, and that problem is well-documented, so I won’t really go into details here.  “Lighty” has served me well for the past few months, but for reasons I’m about to explain, I felt the need to move to a different platform.

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